I miss Visual Basic. I could build something meaningful with it in 15 to 30 minutes in a way that I have never seen anything since then, even come close to.

“For example, I personally believe that Visual Basic did more for programming than Object-Oriented Languages did,” Torvalds wrote, “yet people laugh at VB and say it’s a bad language, and they’ve been talking about OO languages for decades. And no, Visual Basic wasn’t a great language, but I think the easy DB interfaces in VB were fundamentally more important than object orientation is, for example.”

retool.com/visual-ba…

Visual Basic 3 was the first programming language and application building framework that clicked with me. I never loved the language or the inconsistencies, but it just worked. I started with GW Basic, then Turbo Pascal in high school while prepping for college. My high school business teacher let me take an independent study where I made a simple video game in the spirit of Duck Hunt, where the Energizer bunny would explode into bloody bits when you clicked on it. She wasn’t prepared for that, and told me to spend the next half of the year just doing what I was doing.

Visual Basic 6 was the last version I used before Microsoft effectively killed it with .dot by trying to turn it into something it was not. I had already started writing more web/PHP code to avoid Delphi and .net/C# code.

Trying to build a Mac app today makes me sad. There isn’t a good visual way to create an app, which is both the strength and weakness of Visual Basic’s model. When you made a VB application, it looked like a Windows app. Anything I have ever dabbled with Xcode and other application frameworks looks like an unstyled/blank canvas, making me quickly feel fatigued.

I know several people are trying to build one of these apps using Python, but it still feels like the infamous owl drawing, where step #1 is too basic, and the final step is impossible to get to. I’m hoping that AI can help fill in the “how to draw the owl steps,” but my concern is that modern-day frameworks are an impossibly hard bar to maintain and worth it for someone like myself, who isn’t paid to work on them.

I love Python, but I miss Visual Basic.