It's funny to me when we denouce BASIC unconditionally but promote the web as an application platform when in most cases, they're used for the same reasons (pervasiveness, compatibility, ease of distribution, technical accessibility)
I don't think either would be a programmer's "first choice" based on engineering qualities alone.
@jjg anyone else wonder if the web would have been better to develop for if visual basic had ended up being the scripting language?
@jjg i agree its not great... But i think vb had modules back then which would've been an improvement over the early web
@alienghic I guess it depends if you're referring to VB or vbscript (the latter was supported by IE, the former not). As far as I know, vbscript didn't support modules.
Before .NET I wrote a lot of VB modules for server-side bits on Microsoft platforms.
I don't have strong feelings about which language is better between js and vbscript, but having a language which is owned by one company has disadvantages.
@jjg Ah I never wrote vbscript, I thought it was closer to visual basic.
Microsoft's unwillingness to let go of vbscript is why we ended up with javascript. But it's possible a Microsoft with better predictive power might've released VBscript to an open standards body and the web might be written in a different language.
@alienghic Yeah, vbscript is to VB as Javascript is to Java :)
@jjg @alienghic nice exchange from a different camp that :) but once at a customer's of mine a developer has been flown in by the CFO all the way from the US to develop the investor relations site. The management thought we were a Microsoft shop (we weren't) and this guy was a very good ASP developer. Facing situation on the ground he just bought a big PHP book and finished the site on time (in few weeks).
@alienghic @jjg the problem with standardization of vb script was that there was nothing to embrace, extend and extinguish :) I like how Dale Rogerson sneaked some puns in his very good and still current "Inside COM" book from 1997:
> You might have noticed the word __stdcall above. __stdcall is a Microsoft-specific extension to the compiler. (You know there had to be one).
That was one of my first web-dev toolkits as well. I wrote a helpdesk "intranet" application for a fortune 500 company that way 😅
asp+access was actually v2, the first one was written in some other Microsoft thing that came before ASP but I can't remember what it was called...?
Before access they had ODBC and VB could talk to a the Jet database engine? though I think that was also used by Access?
There was some sort of CGI thing though I can't can't remember what it was called. If I remember right you made two files, one that was kind of like the "UI"/html side and then one that was more like the "code". It was super-funky, may have been part of the IIS that you could download for NT 3.51...
Anyway it sucked, and then ASP came out which looked good by comparison :)
I think ADODB was part of it, but it seems like there was something else.
Anyway, not important, but invoking Greenspun really takes me back!
@alienghic not me :)
However I *do* think Visual Basic was a superior tool for developing applications (note I didn't say *good*, just superior to the web)