Visual Basic!

Visual Basic is one of the most widely used programming languages in the world. The major reason for its popularity is that it allows programmers to create Windows applications quickly and easily.

The origins of Visual Basic are found in a programming language created in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was originally an interpreted language that was designed to simplify the programming process and make programming more accessible to the world at large. Using that philosophy, Microsoft integrated a BASIC interpreter into its operating system MS-DOS. Despite its wide distribution and relative simplicity, BASIC was not able to compete with faster, compiled languages such as C or C++. Thus, BASIC was commonly used for trivial or educational purposes, whereas "real" applications were usually developed in other languages.

In the late 1980s, Microsoft Windows and other graphical user interfaces (GUIs) were still in their infancy. Most PCs were still using text-based operating systems. As people began to realize the benefits of graphical operating systems, Microsoft Windows gained popularity. Unfortunately, creating Windows-based programs was exceedingly difficult. Extensive code had to be written to define precisely what the interface would look like as well as how a user would interact with it.

To overcome this problem, Microsoft revived BASIC in 1991 by introducing Visual Basic 1.0. Using BASIC's heritage of simplicity and its general syntax , this new development tool gave programmers an easy way to create Windows applications. In the years since, Microsoft has continued to improve Visual Basic by releasing newer versions. These improvements include not only enhancements to the development environment but also modernization of the core BASIC language as well. These renovations include making BASIC object oriented and fully event driven, and overcoming the limitations of being interpreted, allowing programmers to generate a compiled executable code .