franga20005 hours ago
Makes it that much more absurd that tooling on modern platforms isn't anywhere near this level of discoverability and developer-friendliness.
I'm not sure if that's the right term, but by discoverability I basically mean having things like pallettes, property editors, visual builders, codegen... Basically that I can look at the pallete of widgets, drag a button onto the screen, click on it, see and rich-edit all the possible properties about the button, one-click codegen an event handler for any possible event of the button... No documentation, no guessing the names of properties of events, everything is just there right in front of me. I miss that from VB.
booty3 hours ago
VB6 sure looks nice, but I promise it was a hostile mess for anything besides simple GUI apps.
Also, trust me, the VB6 interface hits a lot different (which is to say: worse) on a cramped 800x600 or 1024x1768 monitor than whatever spacious thing you're probably viewing it on. =)
Makes it that much more absurd that tooling on modern
platforms isn't anywhere near this level of discoverability
and developer-friendliness.
1. The VB6 UI element palettes work well because there's essentially a 1:1 correlation between the icon and the thing it produces when you drop it onto the canvas. That works well for visual elements but less well for things that don't have visual analogs.
2. Toolbars/palettes don't scale well past a few dozen items, whereas a VSCode-style command palette or text command autocomplete can scale nearly infinitely.
3. The way HTML works is a totally different paradigm than VB6's fixed grids. Obviously (as this demo shows) you can do that in HTML, as long as you're willing to ship stuff that kind of works like a VB6 app.
genghisjahn4 hours ago
Being able to drag a control onto the form and then double click it to get to the event code is just magical. I remember very well clicking around and building things for several hours before reaching for a docs back in the day.
ndiddy2 hours ago
Drag-and-drop visual design is the best possible approach until you add the constraint that the window has to be resizable. Then it turns into endlessly messing with the anchoring and resizing settings for each individual widget, and whenever you add/remove a widget or change the form layout you have to mess with everything again. The best experience I've had with UI development is on Palm OS, simply because all devices have the same 160x160 logical resolution and all software runs in fullscreen. You never have to worry about resizing anything so drag-and-drop design with everything just placed on absolute coordinates becomes feasible.
screamingninja3 hours ago
> by discoverability I basically mean having things like ...
intuitiveness?
badsectoracula11 hours ago
Looks good functionality wise, you can even "compile" an app to a HTML file. This is exactly how something like this should work :-).
However, appearance-wise it looks very noisy/distorted with some crooked elements (especially window buttons) and missing visual parts (mainly bevel edges). I made a screenshot with comments for it[0].
I guess this was made with AI which isn't that great at making stuff pixel-level unless you explicitly told it to check reference images and be pixel level precise, so i'd recommend firing up a VM with WinXP in classic theme mode (or even better, 86Box running Windows 95 or Windows 98) and grabbing a bunch of screenshots.
Also i found some bugs:
1. You cannot click on non-visual controls (or disabled controls) to select them (e.g. timer). You can still use the rect selection to select them and drag them around by resizing via the handles but clicking on them selects the form.
2. Adding a control doesn't update the controls list in the editor unless you double click a control without a handler (i.e. the form, as long as you remove the Form_Load handler). Even after the controls are updated, if the event list has only one event, you cannot have the editor add by selecting it (i guess because it is already the selected item and you don't receive an event about selecting it).
I tried to make a simple pong game but it seems no key or mouse motion events are implemented yet so all i did was to make a bouncing OptionButton :-P.
[0] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/5ffbf1494821c77a3fe...
giancarlostoro5 hours ago
> I guess this was made with AI
I'm working on my own with AI (separate from this one - unrelated), its a slow burn, but I want to make a source-compatible compiler. So far I can open up forms, and source code (its all IDE specific) but until I build up the actual compiler / debugger, its all cute but nowhere near where it could be. Whenever I have something worthwhile I will put it up on GitHub more than likely.
I've been using screenshots, but I also did find an old laptop I still had a licensed copy on (in my college years I had access to DreamSpark and MSDN).
wisoop8 hours ago
Its fun project and has many bugs still , its major work to make this fully work as one would expect, but keep checking I am putting many new features and fixes now. Thanks for feedback.
HackerThemAll7 hours ago
> appearance-wise it looks very noisy/distorted with some crooked elements (especially window buttons) and missing visual parts (mainly bevel edges).
Nitpicking. Let me reflect - runtimeterror.com has no https which is available for free, so I'm not entering it.
swiftcoder5 hours ago
> runtimeterror.com has no https which is available for free, so I'm not entering it
I think your threat model needs some work here. What exactly does https guard against when downloading a jpeg? A intermediary swapping it out for a different jpeg?
Downloading things from an unknown domain over https still carries the risk of the site itself vending you malware...
4gotunameagain4 hours ago
Perhaps a compromised device on the local network can MiTM a javascript payload that exploits three zero days on HackerThemAll's browser stack, pwning his computer and finally enabling his super advanced, persistent adversaries to get exfiltrate his super important data.
And all that for what, for a VB6 screenshot on a hn comment threat while procrastinating on top secret work ?
Nah, not worth it.
badsectoracula6 hours ago
> runtimeterror.com has no https which is available for free, so I'm not entering it.
It is a direct image link, it wont ask your password.
Also, https is not available for free even if some solutions are available without asking money for it. In this case: the site is on a shared host so the only option is the paid one from the host (so it isn't free-as-in-money) while the alternative is having a VPS and installing something like let's encrypt (which is more expensive than the shared host and requires me to play sysadmin for it, so not only it isn't free-as-in-money but also free-as-in-time).
HanClinto2 hours ago
I mirrored the bug report on the author's Github project [0], so if it helps, you can view the screenshot there.
waldrews12 hours ago
The property grid control is still the greatest general purpose UI of all time. Define your classes with some attributes and it just works. It was all downhill from there with web and mobile.
wisoop8 hours ago
I always wonder how we have lost so many useful concepts in our tooling and IDEs.
HackerThemAll7 hours ago
The reason was the coders' mindset who entered the job market after 2000, maybe up to 2010, that the ability to code (to use a programming language) is the ultimate development of homo sapiens. With that solved by AI, we can safely start going back to simple, sane concepts like low-code and no-code, property sheets and drag & drop user interfaces.
pjmlp6 hours ago
Because script kiddies in the early 2000's, only know vi and emacs, and have nostalgia for using computers as many of us did up to the early 1990's.
anakaine8 hours ago
Because I learned on this, it made learning everything else that much harder. Even today I wish there was something as functional, basic, and intuitive, even though I well.understand the reasons for doing things different ways.
jit_tech12 hours ago
VB6 compressed a lot of the software development loop into one environment: change a property in a control, attach a behaviour and run.
I am wondering if newer avatars of coding agents can bring that back. Two reasons 1) Code generation is getting faster 2) More and more code is becoming a detail that is expected to work
Imagine a RAD where we have a VB6 like experience and can dive into real code (agent-generated) when the abstraction breaks.
slfnflctd6 hours ago
Yes, please.
I spent a lot of time cutting my teeth in MS Access, and would've done a whole lot more in VB6 if it didn't become deprecated so quickly. It's like a whole smooth ecosystem I expected to persist and improve just evaporated, all in favor of much more fiddly stuff or much more expensive stuff (or if you're really unlucky, both).
I would like to see a comeback in this area, with modern security features and reduced bottlenecks for scaling.
rapnie6 hours ago
I remember in Visual Studio putting a breakpoint on a line, running the execution cursor over it step by step and seeing all variable values that are in scope change in real time. Then being able to drag the cursor back to somewhere before the breakpoint, and edit any value to see if stepping through yields better outcomes. Quite powerful and delightful that.
slfnflctd2 hours ago
That was part of what was so great about it, the many different ways it provided new developers to learn and get granular feedback as they went along, without encumbering the workflow for more experienced users.
I took it for granted, expected it to always be there-- wish I had something similar to point modern juniors to.
avallach9 hours ago
From the same author: C# browser ide inspired by the modern visual studio https://github.com/wieslawsoltes/SharpForge
He has 500+ open source repositories including very advanced stuff like GPU powered gui framework and game engine components ( https://wieslawsoltes.github.io/Home ). It's very impressive and almost hard to believe that a single person could make all of this, even with help of modern ai agents.
wisoop8 hours ago
Its new era, you can build, experiment and do fun projects at will , takes few hours to get anything into working prototype. Some of projects might fail, be buggy but exploration pace is unmatched and fun level too.
elendilm8 hours ago
It is the norm for capable developers. You don't need AI slop for it. Linus Torvalds took a week or two off to out-build the version control industry.
Competent developers have, can, and will out-build entire industries in a week.
rwmj8 hours ago
Why's it hard to believe? AI tools can generate enormous quantities of slop if you have the money to spend.
The real test is if any of it is any good or not.
jordanscales7 hours ago
> border-color: var(--vb-light) var(--vb-dark) var(--vb-dark) var(--vb-light);
This creates 45 degree corners on the borders which are an uncanny valley to me [1]. Feel free to lift any CSS you need from https://jdan.github.io/98.css/, it's MIT licensed. I used a box-shadow hack to get the "staircase" look.
> box-shadow: inset -1px -1px #0a0a0a,inset 1px 1px #fff,inset -2px -2px grey,inset 2px 2px #dfdfdf;
[1] https://notes.jordanscales.com/98-css-reflections#when-butto...
Dwedit16 hours ago
Best part of VB5 was that when you hit F1, you instantly got help for whatever was under the cursor. VB6 changed it to use some much slower MSDN help system instead.
sssilver15 hours ago
This was also the best part of QBASIC.
It was just wonderful. I owe so much to that thoughtful feature as a child.
I wish I could meet the person who decided that. You’ve changed my life.
nurettin13 hours ago
It was the best part of turbo pascal as well. Before IDEs decided to hide information.
aryx8 hours ago
For the old coding environment nostalgic out there, I've made one for TurboPascal here: https://aryx.github.io/ocaml-elm-playground/apps/#programmin...
asadman hour ago
VB6 was my first "language" back in high school and how I earned money ie. making software for local folks. It was great!
That and Flash is what I miss, we don't have the tools anymore. Lost in hunt for "optimal" or "responsive" apps.
sijmen20 hours ago
Slick! Thanks for bringing back some memories of how i got into programming; by automating math-homework in visual basic.
vjvjvjvjghv15 hours ago
Wow, this feels almost like the real thing.
Is there something similar for the web now? Easy UI editor but a fully featured language behind with direct database access.
2001zhaozhao12 hours ago
For what it's worth, I'm thinking of some version of this for my upcoming game's modding tools, although the backend processing will be on a web server unlike this demo, and there is much more of an AI agent focus.
meredydd9 hours ago
This is pretty much exactly https://anvil.works (I'm a founder). The full-featured language is Python (both server and client side). Hit Publish and we'll host it for you (database included), or git-clone it and self-host.
There are a bunch of escape hatches if you want to get to the lower level platform (eg use JS libraries, or express a particular piece of styling in HTML+CSS), but the core experience is very VB-like: drag, drop, edit properties, run code on events.
Narishma16 hours ago
These kinds of browser recreations of old native apps always fails at text rendering.
nullpoint42015 hours ago
What's wrong with it? Sure it's way more higher quality but the layout seems... fine?
notpushkin11 hours ago
Yeah, it’s not 100% correct (some margins are off to my eye) but it’s okay.
Some texts on the other hand scream LLM to me. E.g. this label in the Print Code dialog:
> Opens a browser print window containing source only. Browser and operating-system print settings remain native.
This is just not how humans write. In fact, I don’t think a human would write anything here – it’s an implementation detail, not something that should be user-facing.
nullpoint4202 hours ago
Ah I got whooshed, I interpreted text rendering literally. As in shaping, kerning, and aliasing haha
functionmouse15 hours ago
LLMs lack taste
stsch9 hours ago
Childhood resurrected, awesome! 30+ years later, I'm still super fast in it, lol. Thanks!
fg1376 hours ago
From the title I thought someone managed to emulate VB6 in the browser which would be quite a feat. Turns out it's a retro version of wix and produces html and JavaScript, more or less. Can't say I'm excited.
sajithdilshan8 hours ago
This is nostalgic. Although I think VB didn't have anti-aliasing back then. However, I remember creating an app with a UI and MS Access to store data with VB and it felt like magic to me.
wisoop8 hours ago
Well pixel perfect would require different rendering approach. I am adding new WebGPU rendering engine and might add this original look as option too.
vunderbaa day ago
Nice job - definitely consider implementing at least a little bit of the Win32 API layer! For kicks I tried importing an old highschool VB6 map editor at it which uses BitBlt but sadly it didn't work.
wisoop8 hours ago
Yeah working adding some basic Win32 api compatibility.
mempko44 minutes ago
I wrote my first programming language compiler on VB6. Yes, a strange thing to create a programming language. VB6 has a special place in my heart.
nickstinemates3 hours ago
VB6 was peak programming and the nostalgia levels are insane.
msephton5 hours ago
Super cool! Brings back so many memories. I wrote some very popular apps in VB back in the Windows 9x era: hot corners, screen savers, notes app, and many more.
theblazehen9 hours ago
Good times! My first programming language :)
I remember sitting in class in school, writing out programs on paper for me to try out at home
yard20108 hours ago
I already forgot I did that too. Too bad you can't relive parts of your life '_'
karlkloss12 hours ago
3 - 3.01 = -0.009999999999999
That brings me back.
olmo236 hours ago
This is still true in JavaScript and many other modern languages.
Well, it's close in JS: 3 - 3.01 = -0.009999999999999787
hagbard_c19 hours ago
The speed with which this thing launches in a browser should put shame on the faces of current IDE developers. While VB itself was nothing to write home about there certainly was something lost when hardware became more powerful. Imagine what current and 'recent' hardware were capable of if only efficiency was taken seriously again. Maybe generative AI can provide a boost where human developers would rather spend their time on chasing the latest fads, adding yet another feature or inversely removing even more functionality in an attempt to create the 'perfect' sparse application? Let the humans think up the features and write the initial implementation, then loosen the bots on the code to make it run as efficiently as possible on hardware which used to be current a few generations back.
hyperhello19 hours ago
The power relationship between the computer and the human has shifted since then. We want our computers to run slower so we don’t feel quite so inferior.
fuzzzerd18 hours ago
I don't. It's a machine, it should be fast and efficient.
hyperhello18 hours ago
Are you sure? A UI based on instant gratification? Seeing everything simply blink into place instantly might not be as fun as you think after the newness wears out.
Anyway, if you really want to, you can emulate old OSs with a very fast modern computer. Some emulators even bridge the network and file system to support enough that you can really live in it.
aero_code17 hours ago
I would love if everything on a computer were instant. One of the fastest programs I use is Sublime Merge for a Git UI. It opens and does everything so fast, and I love it. Since the first time I opened it, I haven't even opened the previous Git GUI I was using, even though I like both their UIs about the same. I had to buy Sublime Merge, compared to the free app I was using before it.
It's not just me who prefers everything as fast as possible, but true of people in general. Google measured that slowing down loading a search page by only 400ms caused people to do fewer searches. And the biggest reason I heard people say they switched to Chrome was that it was faster than other browsers (which was true for the first couple years after release).
hyperhello17 hours ago
[flagged]
nvme0n1p116 hours ago
The less work something has to do, the faster it is, and the less things that can go wrong.
Compare a simple light switch circuit vs a "smart" light switch that's slow because your smart hub talks to some AWS service. Or a native app vs an electron monstrosity that takes 10 seconds to load.
Yes, I want my tools to be fast, not only for speed's sake, but because speed is a sign of simplicity and reliability.
bitwize16 hours ago
> Are you sure? A UI based on instant gratification? Seeing everything simply blink into place instantly might not be as fun as you think after the newness wears out.
laughs in Amiga
sakesun17 hours ago
I guess you don't have the same opinion with your vehicle.
[deleted]17 hours agocollapsed
pcdoodle118 hours ago
Awesome! If only we could publish the programs as a PWA :)
WillAdams15 hours ago
Thoughts on tools capable of that?
- Xojo is a commercial tool which I believe does that (but with a price and license to match)
- MoonBasic seems like a promising start
- Gambas for folks using Linux?
- For folks using the very affordable PureBasic there is the matching (also commercial, just about as affordable) SpiderBasic
Naturally if one extends the search to other languages there are lots of options, but Lazarus with a .js Object Pascal compiler seems worth mentioning. For my part, I was swayed when flet.dev announced their v1.0 and so went the Python route....
wisoop8 hours ago
You can export apps as single page html, more original exports are on the works but it more complex.
badsectoracula11 hours ago
FWIW, the File menu has a command to export the program as a self-contained HTML file.
notpushkin11 hours ago
Have you tried File → Make [ProjectName].html...?
brian_herman17 hours ago
This would be awesome
sasakrsmanovic23 hours ago
Was this built with Uno Platform too?
contificate7 hours ago
This really takes me back - not that far, alas, as my Scottish high school was teaching VB6 in 2016!
Kuyawa16 hours ago
Oooh beautiful! Visual Foxpro was the same, only the language changed but their screen designers were almost identical
notpushkin11 hours ago
And the Visual Studio, obviously :-)
Also MS Access form designer was quite like that; I kinda miss it.
BadBadJellyBean2 hours ago
The example code is bad. It doesn't even have "On Error Resume Next" on the top of the code. How are you supposed to skip all errors? SMH my head.
john_owl10 hours ago
That's great! I used to love creating UI with VB6 when I was a teenager in high school.
wiradikusuma15 hours ago
Debugging and IntelliSense don't work, and the deliverable isn't a .exe but an .html (though it works). Wondering if it can access ODBC lol.
anakaine7 hours ago
I reckon you might be asking for a little too much from a single web dev there.
webprofusion12 hours ago
Looks great! However using an active trademark from a mega corp seems like risky move even for a fun project.
pieter_mj9 hours ago
I promise I will not hack the project when OLE controls become available.
t1234s3 hours ago
I miss the old NT4 look. Its was very productive and no slop/nonsense.
HanClinto2 hours ago
I've been using 98.css [0] as a foundation for building many of my personal projects lately -- I think it's pretty great, and a really refreshing return to some older paradigms.
egonschiele16 hours ago
This takes me back! Right clicking works too, this is awesome. I miss property tables, that was a nice UX. Flash had it too.
orthodonticjake20 hours ago
easy way to trigger an Epic developer
Onavo19 hours ago
Wait Epic as in the medical software is written in VB6‽
roywiggins18 hours ago
The GUI parts are or were.
And parts of their patient portal website were still VB6 on the backend a decade ago, not sure that's true anymore. Visual Basic 6 as a web backend.
SoftTalker18 hours ago
VB was the backend language for the vast majority of original Active Server Pages sites.
zdimension14 hours ago
My memory may fail me, but I'm pretty sure ASP used VBScript, not regular VB. Similar syntax but not the same runtime/environment. ASP could use any Active Scripting language (the other language shipped with Windows being JScript, MS's impl of a subset of JS)
SoftTalker4 hours ago
Frequently VB if your application had COM components in Microsoft Transaction Server. I shudder at the memories. But yes, the <% ... %> inclusions in the .asp files were actually VBScript (usually) not full VB.
EvanAnderson11 hours ago
You're correct. I did a ton of ASP in JScript back in the day, but VBScript was much more common.
bitwize16 hours ago
Here's something that will bake your noodle. Sage 100, the accounting/ERP software, is still to my knowledge written in Business BASIC from the 1970s—specifically the variant that ran on MAI Basic Four minicomputers (just 64 KiB of RAM!). This variant of BASIC was so, as Claude says, load-bearing that several companies emerged to support source-compatible versions on a variety of platforms as the non-mainframe business world evolved from custom-schmustom minicomputers to Unix workstations and PCs. The most common variants today are BASIS International's BBx and BBj (Java), and ProvideX. Sage 100, originally MAS 90 and MAS 200, was an accounting solution originally developed for those 1970s minicomputers and then forward-ported to new platforms as the business landscape evolved.
EvanAnderson11 hours ago
I dealt with ProvideX code for a Customer who was using an industry-specific customized version of MAS 90. I managed to see some of the source (under NDA) of the customizations and it was fucking horrifying-- line numbers and GOTOs and global variables. It makes my eyes burn a little thinking about it...
bitwize2 hours ago
One feature that Business BASIC did have even way back in 1975 that I really appreciate is some form of exception handling: just about every I/O operation had, as a required argument, at least one line number to jump to in case of failure. Some required several, for different types of failures (file not found, I/O error, etc.).
That code you looked at must have been incredibly old! I think that BBj and ProvideX both added structured-programming features to make working in their environments at least somewhat tolerable. As intolerable as we find it today, Business BASIC was really a breath of fresh air in its time compared to the alternatives, like COBOL...
EvanAnderson2 hours ago
I dug up to code to make sure I was remembering properly and, oh boy, I was! There's a header on the file that indicates a revision date of 2011. I wonder if the coding style isn't based on style-guidelines at the MAS 90 customization company. I'm betting they have code going back decades, and keeping a consistent style is probably a win (even if the style is eye-gougingly bad to read). I do see they've adopted a mix of numeric line numbers and alphanumeric labels.
I'm used to "ON ERR GOTO"-type error handling in BASIC dialects, whereas in this code I'm seeing a lot of defensive "IF ERR=xxx" after API calls. It looks like they're also "cleverly" using the division by zero handler as an "escape hatch" out of a subroutine. To paraphrase some their code:
> 31338 IF ERR=15 THEN LET ERRMSG$=MSG(-1) ELSE IF ERR=14 THEN GOSUB DB_LOGIN; IF NO_CONNECT THEN LET a=1/0 ELSE GOTO 31337
That's the stuff!
Apparently they didn't make use of line renumbering (or the ProvideX environment doesn't support it) because I see features and error-handling shoehorned in between lines numbered ascending by 10. It reminds me of 9 y/o me shoehorning in new code when I was trying to write text adventure games using a unique INPUT / IF/THEN / GOTO block for each "room" of the game.
theYipster13 hours ago
For anyone who has had to touch any desktop version of Sage in 2026, this is not at all a surprise.
Onavo19 hours ago
How does it compare with
tech234a16 hours ago
This one supports opening existing projects
qxxx13 hours ago
really cool! brings the memories back.. I used to create few shareware products back then with VB3 - VB6.
imnotr0b0t18 hours ago
Wow, that's great. It brings back so many memories
dkga16 hours ago
My first <del>love</del>IDE…
JodieBenitez13 hours ago
Damn... brings back memories...
truetraveller19 hours ago
Was this done with an LLM? Repo?
ranger_danger18 hours ago
Their github account lists over 5,000 commits and 1,500 pull requests... just in the last 4 days.
tech234a18 hours ago
Yes, if you look at the developer's Twitter account they've shared a large number of projects in the past week, including in-browser recreations of Windows Vista, XP, 2000, ME, 98, 95, 3.1, Mac OS 9, Word, Excel, OneNote, Access, Visio, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Reader, a Git Client, a CAD program, a video editor, etc. https://x.com/wieslawsoltes
pan6918 hours ago
Looking through his work it seems that he has build a whole .net browser based ecosystem [1]. Pretty impressive its own right. However, for his showcase projects I was wondering how he'd prompt to guide these recreations, i.e. what is used as the input, I can't image that he'd describe every tiny detail...
userbinator16 hours ago
I was wondering how he'd prompt to guide these recreations, i.e. what is used as the input, I can't image that he'd describe every tiny detail...
I thought the same way when I saw some impressive AI-generated videos not long ago, and I suspect the author prompted AI to get a basic idea, and then possibly after many iterations, finished it up with manual editing.
krackers16 hours ago
Author of this one shared the exact process https://x.com/anabology/status/2106473469441384788
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1aIbRs2f6sVpCxO4TGoBf... (direction-log.md shows all the human provided input). It is far less than you'd think.
zerr10 hours ago
I wonder how much did it cost.
_blk12 hours ago
Uhoh, that'll bring back 1-based array indices
broast18 hours ago
This is amazing
diavelguru18 hours ago
talk about a blast from the past!
Sarkie19 hours ago
Intellisense?
Was that there?
nvme0n1p119 hours ago
What do you mean?
Does the site have intellisense? Yes
Did VB6 have intellisense? Also yes
jimmygrapes13 hours ago
IIRC even QuickBASIC 4.5 had a form of "IntelliSense" in the form of hints as to the defined data structure, if provided in DECLARE statements. F1 hints are mentioned elsewhere for built-ins but I seem to recall it (or a similar quick action) also working for a smart of "what kind of data are you allowed to pass to this user defined subroutine or function".
vunderba13 hours ago
So I think you're talking about TYPES.
TYPE PERSON
AGE AS INTEGER
FIRSTNAME AS STRING * 12
END TYPE
DIM KURTZ AS PERSON
PRINT KURTZ._
However you are right that if you hit F1 on KURTZ it would then show User defined PERSON, and then you could hit F1 again and it would show built-in help of user defined TYPE with AGE/FIRSTNAME properties. Sort of like context-sensitive help I guess.
As far as subroutines/functions go, if you tried to pass data into a subroutine where the data couldn’t be coerced, it would just give you a generic type mismatch.
DIM Y AS SINGLE
Y = 10.5
PRINTIT Y ' Throws parameter type mismatch
PRINTIT (Y) ' Succeeds through a self-evaluated expression which is effectively BYVAL because Microsoft takes pain in your suffering.
SUB PRINTIT (X%)
PRINT X%
END SUB
I've spent the last 6 months building a similar 1:1 faithful recreation of QBASIC and QuickBasic 4.5 that runs natively in the browser [1] - so I know way more about this than anyone should by right.
mkrishnana day ago
Wow. very nice, it even runs the app
shevy-java8 hours ago
Kind of cool how far the browser as platform progressed.
We look back at people's computers, say, 30 years ago now.
And in 30 years the people will look back at us and wonder why we sucked so much. Or, AI skynet slop is winning, then we all look up to our AI overlords.
webbrainiac8 hours ago
[flagged]
486sx3320 hours ago
[dead]
96427996437716 hours ago
[dead]
bitwize16 hours ago
OK, so I followed through to the author's GitHub page and the project's repository and...
no CLAUDE.md, no AGENTS.md, no SKILL.md, no .claude or .agents directories either.
Dare we dream? A project this ambitious, done without AI help? I'm getting that feeling like when I see a piece of really well done art come across my feed—and it was done entirely by a human!
drnick116 hours ago
> no CLAUDE.md, no AGENTS.md, no SKILL.md, no .claude or .agents directories either.
Untracked.
tech234a16 hours ago
Unfortunately I have to point you at some of the other comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958929