Visual Basic on the PC with Windows 3.1 | Hacker News Reader

Visual Basic on the PC with Windows 3.1

stonetools.ghost.io

38 pointsTMWNN24 comments

I'm so old ... I got a coding job in 1991. The boss asked if I had any experience in Visual Basic. I said no, but it just came out last week. It's hard to describe what a huge leap for mankind that was compared to QuickBasic.

It really was an incredible tool especially for RAD. One of my first "professional" gigs was in highschool porting an old CAD program written for VB-DOS over to VB 3.0. Sure as hell beat the landscaping work I did over the previous summer.

Wow “RAD” is such a throw back. Everything is now RAD with AI, we need to bring back the term.

Funny, you'd think the idea of a graphical version of BASIC would have come to mind when he bought MacBasic for $1:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

For my part, I've decided that my next project will probably be done in PureBasic/SpiderBasic, and that if I then feel the need for pure opensource goodness I'll port it Gambas.

That said, if one wants HyperCard on the Mac (or Windows) there's still LiveCode (though it gave up on opensource).

Does anyone remember ToolBook? I spend a couple of years from the mid to late 90s working with this daily, crossing from Windows 3.11 into Windows 95/98. It's a bit Visual Basic-esque, as a matter of fact, Paul Allen was a founder of the company that produced it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToolBook

Yes, used it quite a bit, and even bought the Heizer Software conversion tool to make my HyperCard Stacks run on it --- insofar as anything ran in it, performance was rather lacking, unless one had a cutting edge machine.

I guess everyone moved on from it to Runtime Revolution (which became LiveCode).

I included a shout out to ToolBook, with screenshots and comparative features, in the article. Specifically, I show how it addresses some of the complaints I had with Visual Basic's IDE.

> AdGuard DNS blocked access to stonetools.ghost.io because it’s in our database of phishing and malicious domains

Author here. Let me first note that the site is 100% free, and requires no account to read anything. I only use the built-in Ghost blogging subscription for those who want it delivered to their email, but it is absolutely not necessary. That's the full and total extent of anything email related with the site. I have many readers who subscribe to the RSS feed, which is free and open and requires no email whatsoever.

I have been trying to get this unblocked for some time now. I've tried reporting it as a false positive, and so did the Ghost admins, through the Google safebrowsing report mechanism. I saw my blog listed on phishtank.net, but that site isn't accepting new accounts and I have to have an account to report a false positive.

Ghost admins recommended I use a custom subdomain, and it may come to that. Sorry for the inconvenience, this is very frustrating.

i just took that pesky 's' out of https and it let me click thru.

Thank you, that's great to know! (I also found the method for reporting false positives to AdGuard, and hopefully that will get cleared up on their end one day.)

FYI, I've visited and enjoyed your site previously and can't connect now. It's not due to ublock. Neither Firefox nor Edge can access it due to:

    Secure Connection Failed

    An error occurred during a connection to stonetools.ghost.io. SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length. 

    Error Code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG

Very strange. I'll send that off to the Ghost admins and see if they can help me with it. Thanks for the error report.

UBlock Origin is also giving me the warning on that domain.

It's not dead. It's included with every copy of Desktop Excel and probably will be for 20 years. Press Alt-F11 and away you go (enable Developer tab first i guess?). Forms, SQL connectors, collections, alot of other stuff even XML parsing is in there somewhere if you dig around enough.

I mean it's like. not being developed anymore and not added to, and its a pain to have it deal with modern stuff like https but. yeah. its only mostly dead.

That would be Visual Basic for Applications, not the full-featured Visual Basic, if I'm not mistaken. I don't think it's possible to save out standalone executables that can run on machines that don't have Excel (or perhaps other Office apps), since its purpose is for Office automation scripting.

You are correct. But, that's about the only difference between VBA and VB. I was a VB developer for 10 years before I wrote my first VBA application (in Excel), and I was surprised when everything I tried to do in VBA just worked(TM).

There are plenty more like VB 5 and 6 changed component architecture from VBX, to OCX (COM based), while adding features to do COM development in VB directly.

VB 5 introduced proper AOT compilation, based on VC++ backend, which was further improved in VB 6.

The debugger / REPL experience was much better on VB than VBA.

You cannot really use most VB components in Excel / VBA unless AddIn support is enabled.

For a bit of the background on that development see:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

> If I dig deep into my own heart, really self-reflect, I find I simply don't possess whatever people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk do.

Apartheid child slaves?

Something like that, yeah.

An affable personal relationship with Jeffery Epstein?

Also like that, yes. (I did include an Epstein-related link in the post)

For you, an inability to contribute anything worthwhile to society?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com