331
coding in the late nineteen hundreds
(thelemmy.club)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
331 points (98.0% liked)
Microblog Memes
11998 readers
1015 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
As much as we love to hate on bad old M$, Visual Basic had a rather feature complete IDE for 1991, including syntax highlighting. At minimum by the 5.0 release (1997) it also had function syntax hints and certainly built in documentation. You could even customize the editor window colors.
Of course it had absolutely no code repository or version control capability whatsoever. It was designed with a one dude, one computer, one project paradigm in mind for sure.
Even with SP6 installed, you need to manually patch in scrollwheel support.
Yes, and the form controls included do not support mouse wheel inputs either unless you manually capture the events in your own code using the Windows API. This includes e.g. multiline text boxes in within VBA applications even as late as in Office 2016 which is monumentally irritating.
But VB itself was certainly among the first modern IDEs. It wasn't the first IDE in general, though. I think that was probably Turbo Pascal back in the DOS days which had its editor, compiler, and debugger (such as it was) all in one lump.
I started professional programming with VB3 in 1995. Just in terms of the ability to create Windows applications, it was light years beyond anything else -- even if it didn't even have custom classes at that point. Maybe Delphi was close.
You could get a "hello world" app up and running in like 40 seconds. It's how I got into programming as a kid. In modern frameworks there's a massive bootstrap barrier that beginners don't get through.
I started using VB to create a music composition app that used MIDI functions to generate the notes. This was very easy to do, but when I started writing my own software synthesis routines, Visual Basic was much too slow to be viable. So I started learning C. I thought creating a Windows application in C would be generally just as simple and easy as visual basic but holy shit was that ever wrong. I ended up doing the computationally-intensive stuff in C and compiling it into a DLL that I accessed from a VB front end. Really the best of both worlds.
Constantly switching between Visual Basic and C was quite the mindfuck, though. Thank god C# came along eventually.