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History Of VB

© Swapna Kamat

The role of programming tools has evolved over the past 45 years along with computer hardware. A programming language today, such as Visual Basic, differs greatly from programming languages of just a few years ago. The visual nature of the Windows operating system requires more advanced tools than were available a few years ago. Before windowed environments, a programming language was a simple text-based tool with which you wrote programs. Today you need much more than just a language; you need a graphical development tool that can work inside the Windows system and create applications that take advantage of all the graphical, multimedia, online, and multiprocessed activities that Windows offers. Visual Basic is such a tool. More than a language, Visual Basic lets you generate applications that interact with every aspect of today's Windows operating systems.

VB evolved as a giant extension to the favorite programming language of the past years BASIC. For the uninitiated, BASIC stands for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Although Visual Basic is a comprehensive programming tool, VB retains its BASIC language heritage. Designers in the late 1950s developed the BASIC programming language for beginning programmers. BASIC was easier to use than other programming languages of the time, such as COBOL and FORTRAN. Microsoft never forgot VB's roots when developing Visual Basic. Newcomers to programming can learn to create simple but working Windows programs in just a short time.

While plain BASIC is a traditional sequential programming language Visual Basic is designed to build applications with Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). A GUI has to cope with the input from a users which is NOT sequential. For example with any Windows program there are a multitude of different combinations of events that a user can use to complete different tasks within the application. It is this use of buttons & lists and the Events associated with them that allow the programmer to control what happens when the user uses the application.

One of the criticism of early version of BASIC was that it tended to produce unstructured code which was hard to read and debug. In the 1980's many variants of BASIC were augmented to include support for structured programming. Specifically, While and For looping and If...Then test constructs were added so that the code could be grouped into blocks.

In the next article, we start with the building blocks of a programming language.

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