Why on earth would you use an AI-generated image [1] (let me be clear: POOR AI IMAGE) for the banner of this project?
If you're going to use genai, you need to make sure it actually looks acceptable. Do at least one careful pass over it before publishing. Just look at the details:
- The text on the book spines doesn’t even spell “Microsoft” correctly.
- Dartmouth is spelled "Darmouth". SIGH.
- The screenshot on the CRT monitor doesn't remotely resemble any version of Visual Basic I’ve ever used and I’ve been using it since Visual Basic for DOS.
Using an image like this sets the tone and impression for the entire book going forward. Right now, that first impression isn’t good.
It won't be long before people realize that having poor AI images looks worse than having no images, in the same way that having a reaction GIF every other paragraph of a blog post fell out of style or deeply generic and unillustrative clip art or stock photos of puzzle pieces or featureless-white-3D-figure-with-hard-hat-holding-question-mark.
I sympathize with the motivations behind it, but it does look cruddy and cheapens the end result.
Get used to it. This is the future we've created for ourselves. It's only going to get worse as people everywhere try to use AI to distinguish themselves. Expect everyone to be an artist, everyone to be an author, everyone to be a programmer. Slop. It's what's for dinner.
The problem isn’t the use of AI. It’s the lack of editorial effort to use AI well.
Modern image generation models can handle text fine. Or the author could have left those artefacts blank and added the text themselves in “post production”
This is just lazy AI use as a replacement for lazy stock image use. The details of exactly how it sucks at its job while providing something that fills a checkbox for someone who has no concern for quality are somewhat different, but the basic failure is the same.
My first impression was that the text style is dismayingly like either an AI wrote most of it or (to be charitable) the author’s writing has been heavily influenced by the current generation of LLM output. So the image style goes perfectly with it.
That computer (and chonky-boy floppy disk) look so unlike any real computer from back in the day that it honestly makes me question if the author knows anything about what that era was like.
These AI images are an absolute plague these days. I’m glad more people think they’re genuinely awful. To me they’re absolutely disgusting. I think I’d honestly prefer Macromedia Flash ads over this.
Haha wow you weren’t kidding. That image is so bad that it looks like it was generated using 3 year old models.
The computer screen I can forgive, but if they author genuinely doesn’t have access to modern image generation tools then they could have at least loaded that image up in GIMP, Paint.NET or even just MS Paint, and added the text themselves.
Not that the author needs my defense, but that image says to me, 'hey, I'm just a guy who wrote a book and there's no budget for art' -- which fits a DIY aesthetic in 2026
VB was practical and useful at the time, especially as a learning tool in school. I enjoyed testing the competitors that arose to emulate its abilities, including RapidQ Basic, Envelope Basic (a.k.a Phoenix Object Basic), some of which are documented here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC
I think it would be cool to see a Documentary on programming languages, e.g. their history, rivalries, successes and downfalls, of the 80s, 90s and 2000s. If it is made correctly, with humor, it could be entertaining, perhaps even profitable.
There is definitely a story to be told in GUI based development environments, from VisualWorks / Digitalk smalltalk to VB to Delphi. Along with the also rans (PowerBuilder, the death of Clipper and dBase systems).
GUI interfaces were going to be a massive productivity goldmine compared to green screens and TUI interfaces. Now here we are back to those again in various forms and web browsers won in the end anyway.
Was a wild ride in the 1990s when it was happening in earnest.
You are correct! I goofEd. It's hard to assimilate a human language on the fly. See that proves I am not an AI :)
It's also worth mentioning Sharpdevelop.net which also gave you the choice of VB.Net or C# and another language, can't recall what it was.
There were so many options available. So many books were written, sold and then became obsolete. I know because I bought tons of them at the now defunct Fry's Electronics and later donated them to the local public library.
But with AI advancing, focusing on programming and earning a CS degree as a future investment does not hold the same appeal that it once did. Of course, this is just my opinion.
This sounds great but I’m genuinely unable to figure out how to get to part one.
Not the thumbnail. Not the pink text “A History of Visusl Basic”. Not the number one on the list of chapters. Not the chapter ousted at the very bottom.
The next button is for a different article.
How am I supposed to navigate to the thing the article is advertising to me? It’s a very strange decision not to make it really easy with a strong call to action or obvious link.
Any time VB comes up I repeat my same wishlist item. I would love for Microsoft to open source it, in any way, shape or form. I would love for the community to take a crack at adding things to VB6 like bugfixes, any missing features (my understanding is they don't own everything about VB6) and just overall general improvements, imagine VB6 with threading. I know its ancient, but it can still produce a native GUI application effortlessly.
VB.NET is open source, supports AOT, and there is little else that VB 6 does better, other than COM integration, which .NET was always a bit lower level
VB6 apps were compiled and did not need a special runtime. If Microsoft had never made .NET we would be in a different world where VB evolved to be a modern day Rust-like RAD language.
You might want to mention the comedy series Microsoft used to run on MSDN. I think it was called “The .NET Show” or “VBTV”. It featured characters like the “VB Rapper” and “Head in a Box” (Ari and Chris). It was genuinely funny and they made at least a few episodes. I loved Microsoft back in those days. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any trace of it online now. This was really long ago - around 2002, I believe.
Much appreciated. VB6 was my first attempt at learning Win32 programming. I’ve written so many tools and games with it; it even helped me land my first job. A true golden age.
My very first purchase on eBay was to buy a used copy of Visual Basic 6 Enterprise Edition sometime while I was in school.
Then for a period of time I lost the physical CD it came with, and couldn’t install it anymore on a new system. Some time later I remember finding the CD at the bottom of some box of random stuff and being so happy - it was scratched up and didn’t reliably install, but I think I managed to burn a copy of it onto a new disk complete with inkjet printed sticky disk label that resembled the original disk.
What I find fascinating (and have posted about in the past) is the story of how 16-bit Visual Basic VBX's became a success disaster, growing out of Microsoft's ongoing programming language wars, during the migration from Win16=>Win32, leading to the wildly successful yet disastrous COM/OLE/MFC/OCX/DCOM/ActiveX/ATL ecosystem, with its influence on COM-clones like mTropolis plug-ins, Macromedia MOA, Qt KParts, OpenOffice UNO, and Mozilla/XulRunner XP/COM, and how Visual Basic Script, MSJVM, ActiveX, and ActiveX Behavior Controls, AJAX, SOAP, etc played out during the browser wars, and how they currently inspire and forewarn WASM development.
>Wow, a blast from the past! 1996, what a year that was.
>Sun was freaking out about Microsoft, and announced Java Beans as their vaporware "alternative" to ActiveX. JavaScript had just come onto the scene, then Netscape announced they were going to reimplement Navigator in Java, so they dove into the deep end and came up with IFC, which designed by NeXTStep programmers. A bunch of the original Java team left Sun and formed Marima, and developed the Castanet network push distribution system, and the Bongo user interface editor (like HyperCard for Java, calling the Java compiler incrementally to support dynamic script editing).
>That's because Java used the old piece-of-shit NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) from 1995, first released in the NetScape 2.0b3 Plug-in SDK: [...]
>More about Netscape's fleeting obsession with Java and Javagator in the pre-LiveConnect/XPConnect/NPRuntime/ActiveX/DHTML/XPCOM/XUL days: [...]
>Yes, I think you've captured the difference: An "extension" is written in an extension language like JavaScript, in a browser that's intended to be extended in that language. A "plugin" is a more independent piece of code written in a compiled language, plugged into a host that doesn't necessarily have its own extension language like JavaScript or Visual Basic.
>It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc!
>And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh!
Glad you asked! One of my favorite topics. ;)
COM is essentially a formal way of using C++ vtables [1] from C and other languages, so you can create and consume components in any language, and call back and forth between them. It's a way of expressing a rational subset of how C++ classes work and format in memory, in a way that can be implemented...
I couldn't open the chapter, but in case anyone else is trying to make a nicely formatted ebook, take a look at EPublish: https://frequal.com/epublish/
It's a software-engineer-friendly tool for converting HTML to EPUB. It handles all the annoying little details. Binaries coming later today.
What an awful site. I suggest you read about prefers - reduced - motion [0]. People who set this preference have a good reason for doing so, you should respect your users a bit.
(I set this preference because motion while I'm trying to read makes me nauseated.)
Oh man... Completely ignores Tiny Basic, Dr. Dobbs, Li-Chen Wang, Dennis Allison, Copyleft, All Wrongs Reversed, etc. There are some decent histories of BASIC through the Dartmouth era, so I can understand why they may want to de-emphasize that.
My suspicion is, however, that BASIC became the 8-bit lingua franca not only because of Gates, Allen & Davidoff's work on the Altair but because of Wang and Pittman's work on Tiny BASIC. The TRS-80 initially shipped with a modified version of Wang's Tiny BASIC. The Apple ][ shipped initially with a Tiny BASIC like interpreter (Integer BASIC) written by Steve Wozniak.
By 1980, all the popular micros had licensed BASIC from MSFT and it's important to understand why. But before understanding why homegrown Tandy, TI, Atari and Apple BASICs fizzled, you have to know they existed first.
Enjoyed the writing... the site is painful though. Please add a tweak to turn off the ".ca" flashing in the top left. Your Contact form is broken as well, otherwise I would have sent this to you directly.
45 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 81.8 ms ] threadIf you're going to use genai, you need to make sure it actually looks acceptable. Do at least one careful pass over it before publishing. Just look at the details:
- The text on the book spines doesn’t even spell “Microsoft” correctly.
- Dartmouth is spelled "Darmouth". SIGH.
- The screenshot on the CRT monitor doesn't remotely resemble any version of Visual Basic I’ve ever used and I’ve been using it since Visual Basic for DOS.
Using an image like this sets the tone and impression for the entire book going forward. Right now, that first impression isn’t good.
[1] - https://evilgeniuslabs.ca/uploads/content/2026/05/6fd5a7b327...
I sympathize with the motivations behind it, but it does look cruddy and cheapens the end result.
Modern image generation models can handle text fine. Or the author could have left those artefacts blank and added the text themselves in “post production”
The computer screen I can forgive, but if they author genuinely doesn’t have access to modern image generation tools then they could have at least loaded that image up in GIMP, Paint.NET or even just MS Paint, and added the text themselves.
The "Oomerd" button is probably the debugger by the sound of it?
https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
and how other competing products such as RealBasic (somewhere I have a book on it) factored in.
VB was practical and useful at the time, especially as a learning tool in school. I enjoyed testing the competitors that arose to emulate its abilities, including RapidQ Basic, Envelope Basic (a.k.a Phoenix Object Basic), some of which are documented here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC
I think it would be cool to see a Documentary on programming languages, e.g. their history, rivalries, successes and downfalls, of the 80s, 90s and 2000s. If it is made correctly, with humor, it could be entertaining, perhaps even profitable.
GUI interfaces were going to be a massive productivity goldmine compared to green screens and TUI interfaces. Now here we are back to those again in various forms and web browsers won in the end anyway.
Was a wild ride in the 1990s when it was happening in earnest.
It's also worth mentioning Sharpdevelop.net which also gave you the choice of VB.Net or C# and another language, can't recall what it was.
There were so many options available. So many books were written, sold and then became obsolete. I know because I bought tons of them at the now defunct Fry's Electronics and later donated them to the local public library.
But with AI advancing, focusing on programming and earning a CS degree as a future investment does not hold the same appeal that it once did. Of course, this is just my opinion.
Sol Roth: The Downvoted Man :)
Not the thumbnail. Not the pink text “A History of Visusl Basic”. Not the number one on the list of chapters. Not the chapter ousted at the very bottom.
The next button is for a different article.
How am I supposed to navigate to the thing the article is advertising to me? It’s a very strange decision not to make it really easy with a strong call to action or obvious link.
https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn
Now I bet what you mean is the graphical part, and yes that is only partial open source.
I remember saving up for it at high school with my student discount. From memory it was about $120.
Then for a period of time I lost the physical CD it came with, and couldn’t install it anymore on a new system. Some time later I remember finding the CD at the bottom of some box of random stuff and being so happy - it was scratched up and didn’t reliably install, but I think I managed to burn a copy of it onto a new disk complete with inkjet printed sticky disk label that resembled the original disk.
Must had been mid/late 90s I think.
Had so much fun making stuff in VB back then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqtwGuGRjJM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817
>Wow, a blast from the past! 1996, what a year that was.
>Sun was freaking out about Microsoft, and announced Java Beans as their vaporware "alternative" to ActiveX. JavaScript had just come onto the scene, then Netscape announced they were going to reimplement Navigator in Java, so they dove into the deep end and came up with IFC, which designed by NeXTStep programmers. A bunch of the original Java team left Sun and formed Marima, and developed the Castanet network push distribution system, and the Bongo user interface editor (like HyperCard for Java, calling the Java compiler incrementally to support dynamic script editing).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44661955
>That's because Java used the old piece-of-shit NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) from 1995, first released in the NetScape 2.0b3 Plug-in SDK: [...]
>More about Netscape's fleeting obsession with Java and Javagator in the pre-LiveConnect/XPConnect/NPRuntime/ActiveX/DHTML/XPCOM/XUL days: [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27405137
>Yes, I think you've captured the difference: An "extension" is written in an extension language like JavaScript, in a browser that's intended to be extended in that language. A "plugin" is a more independent piece of code written in a compiled language, plugged into a host that doesn't necessarily have its own extension language like JavaScript or Visual Basic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042291
>It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc!
>And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20266627
>This article comparing SOM and COM was written by Don Box. (first archived in January 1999, but doesn't say when published):
>The Component Object Model and Some Other Model: A comparison of technologies revisited yet again: [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975257
Glad you asked! One of my favorite topics. ;) COM is essentially a formal way of using C++ vtables [1] from C and other languages, so you can create and consume components in any language, and call back and forth between them. It's a way of expressing a rational subset of how C++ classes work and format in memory, in a way that can be implemented...
It's a software-engineer-friendly tool for converting HTML to EPUB. It handles all the annoying little details. Binaries coming later today.
A book created with EPublish: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX
(I set this preference because motion while I'm trying to read makes me nauseated.)
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...
My suspicion is, however, that BASIC became the 8-bit lingua franca not only because of Gates, Allen & Davidoff's work on the Altair but because of Wang and Pittman's work on Tiny BASIC. The TRS-80 initially shipped with a modified version of Wang's Tiny BASIC. The Apple ][ shipped initially with a Tiny BASIC like interpreter (Integer BASIC) written by Steve Wozniak.
By 1980, all the popular micros had licensed BASIC from MSFT and it's important to understand why. But before understanding why homegrown Tandy, TI, Atari and Apple BASICs fizzled, you have to know they existed first.
#OldManYellsAtClouds