You used to be able to just create a Native GUI App in 10 seconds (opens in new tab)

I remember that not having the right VB DLL was a frequent issue when trying to run EXE files produced by people with visual basic. For me, this Windows "nocode" environment was a big gatekeeper which hindered me in learning programming. It may sound a bit sentimental, but I learned C with Linux, because docs where readily available and open. I literally read man pages.

Today the tooling is just better. Just think, for instance, of the go and rust tool chains which easily produce ready to ship EXE files. Classical toolkits such as Qt still are around.

Someone replied to that post "notice how fast everything is to launch", but did Visual Basic really start up that fast back in the day? I'm old enough to have used XP as a kid, and I remember the languorous boot times, but I never programmed on it. My guess is that XP is running in a VM on modern hardware in this GIF.

I mean...at least for GTK on Linux, you still can? It won't be 10 seconds (probably closer to 30-40 seconds) since you have to go through a couple of prompts to name it, decide a license, etc., but with:

https://apps.gnome.org/Builder/

You can do the same thing. In fact, this was the exact method I used to make a few GTK apps.

In HTML

  <button onclick="alert('Hello')">Command1</button>

Can view without subjecting yourself to "X": https://xcancel.com/tsoding/status/1998403967718400376

There was a time when there were some VB clone languages including Envelop Basic: https://members.tripod.com/joe__shmoe/indext.htm These tools did a pretty good job of creating forms and software. Rebol was another language that was sleek at making UI Form: https://www.rebol.com/index-lang.html Now a days, you need to master many technologies to create one UI component. Too much bloat.

You can still do this!

The only difference is that a lot of apps prioritize cross platform UIs over good, fast native UIs.

WinForms and WPF are still well supported.

There is a modern compiler/ide that’s improving (but also preserving compatibility with) VB6 https://twinbasic.com/

I was able to load up a VB6 project I worked on in high school and it compiled and ran with no changes. Pretty neat.

Would've thought the explosion of web apps would kick MS and Apple in the pants, but here we are. Native dev is still annoying and is arguably getting harder. There's no reason making an app work for just one specific platform should have more friction than doing it for all of them.

I tried this using RosettaCode examples awhile ago and its still possible in quite a few languages. I was trying to find examples where you could just copy the code in, click run, and get a GUI.

I used PureBasic back in like 2003 or 2004. It was super simple. Looks like it's still around and the site looks unchanged since then. Probably crazy fast on modern hardware

Take a look at Slint or Avalonia if you miss this experience.

And I'll take needing an internet connection over having to install Visual Basic from a stack of CDs.

twitter.com?

Is that from OP or HN?