Discussion of Microsoft
VisualBasic on this site is often split between...
For information common to
VbClassic and
VisualBasicDotNet, please refer to the new
MicrosoftBasic page.
Regarding other forms of BASIC...
If there is "visual" Basic, that would imply there might also be
AuditoryBasic and
BrailleBasic.
Absolutely. Sadly, amateur historians like me might guess that that the "visual" name comes from the 1980s trend towards "visual" IntegratedDevelopmentEnvironment s (spearheaded by SmalltalkBrowsers such as the SystemBrowser, and InterfaceBuilder) and ClassBasedLanguages. VB was preceded by VisualSmalltalk, VisualAge, and perhaps many others, such that by 1991, it seems that "visual" was strongly bound to expensive windowing development environments for professional programmers. Prior to VB, most (if not all) BASICs did not have windowing IDEs, nor classes, and were manipulated with a ReadEvalPrintLoop at a text terminal. This text interaction has probably been controlled many times with a Braille terminal , and with a speech synthesizer and speech recognition. Therefore, I guess that Auditory BASIC and Braille BASIC are as prosaic as REPL BASIC development environments with accessible human interfaces.
It appears from this article, http://apcmag.com/now_the_blind_can_program_in_net.htm , that the visual programming revolution has left some people so far behind that you can win an award in 2007 for giving them access to 1980s technology. I just started AccessibleDevelopmentEnvironments to discuss this.
See also:
WhyVisualBasic
CategoryVisualBasic CategoryProgrammingLanguage