VB6 is back! How I learned to code

This is exciting! I was about 4 or 5 when I sat down at a computer and first opened Visual Basic 6 I think (not that I can really remember that now!). This morning, this link popped up in my RSS feeds (from Tom Scott’s newsletter, specifically). I wasn’t sure what it’d be like, but my goodness, it’s so weirdly nostalgic.

The icons! The structure of it! MDI!!! There is so much that I haven’t seen in 15 years at this point, and yet I immediately started remembering some of the things I used to build in VB. I could even remember some of the syntax! This was a time before I knew how to even use the internet really, and besides what internet existed was very slow and meant that people couldn’t take phone calls. I had a book, an enormously weighty tome to be precise, on practically everything you could do in VB6. I didn’t understand even a tenth of the things in that book, I just saw the cool projects, and figured out how to build them by connecting the example code snippets together. Seeing this interface reminded me of the feeling I quite often get when programming nowadays: I really want to make something, but I don’t know how, so I keep playing around until I get there.

I hope someone out there still has all the fun I do with programming and just making things for the heck of it, because with all the no-code solutions and AI nonsense, it feels like we’re losing an artform and fast.

Tagged as: technology nostalgia programming thoughts