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.
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.