Warren Ockrassa wrote:
That might be the correct word. I'm not sure what else could be used to describe how VBS was given total system integration from the beginning, with hooks into (more ore less literally) every portion of the OS. IIRC there were more than a few people, in the pre-95 days, who warned (or tried to warn) MS that they were treading a dangerous path.
But given the other, successful script models that already existed out there, It's hard to fathom why Bill did it as he did.
VB's inventor (Alan Cooper, who was not at Microsoft) was focusing on creating something like HyperCard for Windows -- a tool that would make it easy to hook UI components together with code. I vaguely recall that he didn't do all the OS integration stuff.
I'll speculate that after Microsoft took it over (and Alan walked away), they didn't even consider the implications of networked Windows machines. This was quite a while ago... when it was relatively safe to have tools that could wreak havoc, since they could only screw up the local machine.
Not excusing them, but this history goes back pretty far. The idea of ordinary people having their machines on the Internet was pretty far-fetched. This was in the days when a typical machine came with 20 or 30 megabytes... of hard disk space.
When I first dug into VB, I thought it was wonderfully cool that it was a toolkit that could touch all the OS calls and such. It seemed like a step beyond HyperCard in that sense. Maybe not such a wise step, though. And it became positioned as a serious programming tool, which was never really what HyperCard was supposed to be, even though many of us scripted the heck out of it. It was much more about the UI.
Nick
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