Ryan and David and team, I am so happy to see this posted!
I'm quoted a few places in it. Yes, the story about the origin of the phrase "fire an event" is true and correct. I could even tell you exactly where I was sitting and which way I was facing when that event fired.
Some things stick in your mind, doobies or not.
Also mentioned is the VBX. In some ways, this may have been the worst API I ever designed. It was so bad that Microsoft eventually replaced it with COM! But it was the most successful.
Thanks, Michael! Finding your comments on HN about the design details of the original "Ruby" version of VB and VBX was part of my inspiration for writing this article in the first place. Your recollection of "firing an event" is my favorite kind of classic Silicon Valley story.
Ryan, thank you for writing the article. I remember you described it to me as a "labor of love". Indeed it is that. It also reminds me of how much work goes into journalism like this.
Ruby/VB was a labor of love for us. One of my favorite episodes of Silicon Valley was the TechCrunch Disrupt where every founder said "we want to make the world a better place." It's funny, but true! That is exactly what we wanted to do.
Anyone who likes the "fire an event" story may also enjoy What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff:
Hey, I got started programming in VB3! Thank you for your involvement in forming my expectations of programming.
I feel like my path was so much better because I started from laying out a UI and then learning code as a way to make it do stuff instead of the "lets learn complicated goop with no clear purpose first".
To this day I'm amazed by how ok devs are with not being able to get instant satisfaction from achieving things that should be simple.
Today's equivalent would be an IDE that you hit "new project" and type a few lines and draw a few boxes and you've got something up and running in the cloud. There's nothing like it as far as I know; there's an entire generation or more who have never seen programming work like that, and don't even envision it, it seems. Bold ambitions these days usually amount to a clone of a popular thing, with some kind of tweak that's interesting but not nearly interesting enough to get people to move.
I always loved VB. Super useful for banging together a quick "enter a value in a text box and click a button to do something in the database" utility.
And VBX was a pain, but had some advantages over the COM-based controls. My first job at MSFT in 1994 was to build demonstration apps for interactive TV. When I started there was already a base application in VB3. I needed to add transparently layered images and text with rotation and animated transitions, and a windowless VBX made it easy to build that transparency. IIRC, you could not make windowless OCX controls. I'm not even sure how you'd do independently positioned transparent controls in VB4+.
I hadn't seen that story before, thanks for pointing to it. Lots of great stories on folklore.org! I recommend it to anyone interested in the early days of Macintosh.
I don't think there is a Visual Basic side to the story. Our work was many years after those sorry events.
In fact I never saw the source code for any of the Apple or Microsoft Basics, not even the "Basic" side of Visual Basic. Our team built the "Visual" side of it, code named Ruby. (No relation to the programming language.)
Originally Ruby wasn't going to be combined with Basic at all. It was going to be a user-customizable shell for Windows 3.0. Instead of Program Manager and File Manager, you could create your own desktop with things you wanted on it.
Ruby had a very primitive scripting language, but the language API was designed to allow other interpreters to be plugged into it.
Microsoft later decided to scrap the "shell" idea and create Visual Basic instead.
it's thanks to you and and the whole team that i have a career! i started learning vb late (early 2004), but soon enough i had a small job writing custom software for small business with a couple of friends -- that lead me into actually finding my passion.
honestly, i kind if miss vb6's simplicity: you could create a "proof of concept" in the matter of hours, without having to bother with compiling tools, libraries or anything like that. everything just worked.
VB was my swiss army knife for many years, making utilities for solving organization's pain points, some of which were used unchanged for over a decade. I even made some games in it back in the day!
I'm quoted a few places in it. Yes, the story about the origin of the phrase "fire an event" is true and correct. I could even tell you exactly where I was sitting and which way I was facing when that event fired.
Some things stick in your mind, doobies or not.
Also mentioned is the VBX. In some ways, this may have been the worst API I ever designed. It was so bad that Microsoft eventually replaced it with COM! But it was the most successful.
If anyone has any questions, fire a comment!