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Comment by coleifer | Hacker News Reader

Old-school visual basic, but maybe powered by python or another modern scripting language.

Agreed. Best visual GUI editor ever made. A modern reboot of similar concepts with modern look and feel would be something I would pay for, especially if you could target both desktop and mobile.

The VB GUI editor and IDE generally were a fair ways behind that of Delphi, back in the 90's. With current Lazarus/FreePascal open source Delphi clone you can get a feel for it

May I interest you in something explicitly in that genre?

https://anvil.works is VB6, but for the Web, and in Python. No JS frameworks required! We've had data scientists with no Web experience produce MVPs with it in a couple of weeks.

What I miss about VB was the ease with which I could make desktop applications.

The thing with VB is that the language was designed for the IDE, not the other way around, so i'm not sure if any ready made language would work as good as VB6-the-language worked with VB6-the-ide.

What do you mean by old school? Isn’t it powered by .NET, why would you change that? Genuinely curious, I don’t know much about msft’s developer tools.

No, Visual Basic was its own development stack direct to the OS. It had some pretty nice tooling for creating GUIs in a drag and drop manner. The last version was 6 and that was initially released in 1998.

That being said, the VB6 runtime is STILL in Windows 10, and therefore will be officially supported to a degree for at least 5-8 more years. How’s that for backwards compatibility.

In the early 2000 MSFT released VB .NET (a different language and platform) as a successor, which is what you are thinking of. What the OP misses is the tooling surrounding VB6

I'm building this at dannea.com, but powered by js

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