Timeline for What was the first company to make a drag-and-drop GUI designer like Visual Basic?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S Jan 10 at 7:03 | vote | accept | Felix An | ||
| Jan 5 at 7:17 | answer | added | JacquesB | timeline score: 7 | |
| Jan 5 at 6:46 | history | protected | gnat | ||
| Jan 3 at 10:35 | answer | added | rbanffy | timeline score: 6 | |
| Jan 2 at 16:42 | comment | added | JimmyJames | Not sure if ResEdit fits your definition but it existed long before VB. | |
| Jan 2 at 9:34 | vote | accept | Felix An | ||
| S Jan 10 at 7:03 | |||||
| Jan 1 at 21:43 | comment | added | Doc Brown | @Steve: mostly true, still my comment adresses the idea of " a GUI as a naturally emerging property of the Domain Model" - which I think is, honestly, overidealistic nonsense. The representation you are talking of are mos easily and naturally edited with a graphical designer, even when they are technically textual, which sometimes allows some direct tweaks with a text editor - but that is not what I am talking of. | |
| Jan 1 at 21:12 | comment | added | Steve | @DocBrown, worth remembering that the VB forms designer produced a scripted version somewhat similar to VB itself - so there was never an absence of script. In DotNet, this was carried through to its conclusion, and the forms designer produces bona fine VB.NET/C# code. One of the most beneficial aspects of Microsoft software is that almost anything achievable through the GUI has either a scripted representation, or a scriptable alternative for automation. | |
| Jan 1 at 18:13 | comment | added | Doc Brown | @JörgWMittag: I don't know about Alan Kay's mindset, but my sense of aesthetics tells me that for creating graphical parts of a program using a graphical tool feels much more natural than using a textual description. And I am sure I am not alone with that opinion. | |
| Jan 1 at 15:03 | answer | added | Steve | timeline score: 5 | |
| Jan 1 at 13:43 | comment | added | Jörg W Mittag | @amon: Not sure. I have the feeling a GUI designer tool would have violated Alan Kay's sense of aesthetics. He probably would have argued that, if you need a tool to help you program, your language is too hard and the correct way to fix it would be to make a better language instead of creating a crutch that papers over the language's deficiencies. I think their idea was that if you model the domain correctly, then objects should "just know" how to display themselves, similar to what is now called Naked Objects. I.e., the GUI would be a naturally emerging property of the Domain Model. | |
| Jan 1 at 11:39 | comment | added | Doc Brown | I also found this interesting article about the history of Visual Basic. | |
| Jan 1 at 11:19 | comment | added | Doc Brown | Related: History of the graphical user interface - the article does not contain much about GUI designers, but before asking about the latter, one should look at the availability timeline of GUIs themselves. | |
| Jan 1 at 10:40 | comment | added | Christophe | Indeed, it was probably Smalltalk's IDE. Here a demo of the Smalltalk-80 verdion from the records of a conference held in 1983: m.youtube.com/watch?v=JLPiMl8XUKU | |
| Jan 1 at 9:35 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jan 6 at 3:09 | |||||
| Jan 1 at 8:31 | comment | added | amon | I bet it originated in the Xerox PARC/Smalltalk community because they pioneered both GUIs, IDEs, and WYSIWYG editing. They definitely used interactive development environments where the running program could be inspected and modified on the fly. But I don't have a good reference for that at hand. Many Xerox PARC ideas on GUIs were popularized by Apple with its Lisa and Macintosh products, and Objective-C merged high-level Smalltalk OOP features with the more efficient C language. | |
| S Jan 1 at 7:22 | review | First questions | |||
| Jan 1 at 18:22 | |||||
| S Jan 1 at 7:22 | history | asked | Felix An | CC BY-SA 4.0 |