Roughly 17 years ago, I was in love with QuickBasic. After a while using GWBasic (not to mention years of using BASIC on other systems, such as the Brazilian Sinclair ZX81 clone TK-85, the MSX 1.0, and the Apple II), QuickBasic was a real milestone in my life. It was when I changed from using line numbers and a pretty mangled structure in my programs (using subroutines with GOSUBs and GOTOs) to a more organized one with functions and procedures. I also loved how easy it was to debug inside the Quickbasic 4.5 IDE – you could stop your program at any time, do changes to your code, and then continue running. Programs were interpreted, and while speed wasn’t the best compared to other platforms available for similar DOS machines, immediate execution, easy debugging and the ability to compile executables later made it the platform of choice for all the small programs I liked to create – database merging systems, small graphical or text-based games, and general tools I used on my daily work.

QuickBasic 4.5 (click for source)

But even though I used QuickBasic for most of my stuff, I also used other languages like C and Pascal at high school. For the latter, my IDE of choice was Turbo Pascal. And it’s within that development environment that I had my first run-in with Turbo Vision.

Turbo Vision was, in a nutshell, a framework to create user interface elements for Turbo Pascal programs. It allowed you to easily create menus, buttons, dialog windows and the alike – something that was still pretty rare at the time (considering DOS programs were never really about the user interface). Being able to quickly construct a program with such a high-level interface without doing everything from scratch was quite a shock to me.

Screenshot of "Quadra", showing what a Turbo Vision interface looked like (Click for source)

An even bigger shock was understanding that you could actually create common libraries or frameworks and reuse them on different projects. As obvious as it is today, my self-taught understanding of program structures at the time hadn’t grasped this concept yet. Turbo Vision itself was beautiful, but the idea of Turbo Vision was, for my little coder mind, revolutionary.

So after having my first experience with Turbo Vision, I set out to create a similar framework in QuickBasic that I could use for my own programs (while I enjoyed the speed and correctness of languages like C and Pascal, not to mention the speed, I enjoyed the agility I had with QuickBasic even more).

The result was a bunch of subroutines that could be called to draw and control everything. You could create screen elements like buttons, editable text fields, windows, check boxes, radio buttons, menus and the like, with full tabbing/focusing/clipboard support, and control them using a higher-level API. That allowed me to add great interface elements to my simple programs quite easily, without having to worry about rewriting it every time I needed to create something new. The implementation was somewhat ugly, since QuickBasic would run in a single thread and I had to move execution from one element to another and deal with the return result to know what to do, but it was clear enough in a way that allowed me to reuse elements with certain ease. I still have that code somewhere around my computer.

Fast forward to 2003, around a decade later – after I had abandoned QuickBasic, used a few other platforms and languages, until finally settling with development for the web. While I’m working with ActionScript and developing some visual components for a website, I had an epiphany: I was doing the same thing I had done 10 years before.

The operating system was different: Windows, instead of DOS; the language was not QuickBasic anymore, but ActionScript; I wasn’t building a text-based application, but rather one that used graphical user interface elements and the mouse; I wasn’t reading data from the disk, but from some asynchronous network resource. But still, I was doing the same thing: creating graphical elements that were meant to be reused.

A decade before, I had no idea I was going to be working with Flash (since that didn’t exist), or even be building those kinds of interfaces. Of course I had no idea I would be building something meant to be used over the Internet either. And I had even take some pretty odd routes along the way of my earlier career, focusing in graphic design and animation instead of programming, but still, there I was, full circle, back doing what could be said to be basically the same thing I had been doing at high school, only in an updated environment.

And while I’m not really that old, I like to see this as a great example that no technology lasts forever, and that programmers can’t have any idea of what they’ll be working 10 years later. And, perhaps more strongly now, that while the environment they’re using might be completely different, the concepts they’ve learned before will carry on. In a nutshell, your experience is not the language you use, but what you do with that language.

I guess it doesn’t take much to see how that applies to the issue I’m seeing people debating today – “Rich Internet” platforms like Flash, SilverLight, HTML 5, and a few others. I’ll be the douchebag who quotes himself and just paste what I had to say a short while ago in my FWA interview:

Q. Do you think Flash is here to stay?

A. In a way, most definitely. Flash was the first software platform to allow developers to easily create rich interactive animations for the everyday user, so whatever Flash has brought and is still bringing is something other platforms are playing catch up to adopt.

But on the other hand, you can never predict what the future will be like. When I started working with interface development, Flash didn’t exist and I couldn’t even predict I’d be working with something like it 15 years later.

I love Flash, but after having worked with it for more than a decade and seeing it radically transformed so many times, it’s as if the name doesn’t matter that much anymore. I think what we call RIA development is the thing that’s here to stay and that’ll just become bigger with time, but the name under the hood becomes almost irrelevant. Even if it’s Flash and ActionScript, it’s going to be a different Flash and a different language in a few years. With similarities, but then again there are similarities between ActionScript, Java, and C#. Being attached to that kind of brand isn’t very healthy I guess

Here’s something a lot of people forget – we’re not in this business because we’re using language XYZ. While a lot of people like to draw that kind of conclusion – because, after all, their experience is usually focused on a single language, not to mention the need to identify with a certain group – the market itself changes over time and it’s natural for one language to replace another as the language of choice for a specific task. Remember when Perl was the de-facto server-side language for the web? If you considered yourself a “Perl specialist”, instead of a server-side programmer, you’d be stuck when people started to migrate their systems to PHP and others.

I see the current state of rich interfaces development the same way. We’re doing Flash today – because it’s widespread, the tools available (official or not) are stable enough, it has an awesome community, and it’s generally easy to develop for. What are we going to use tomorrow? I don’t know, but the knowledge I’ve gathered over the years – developing the interface elements I’ve been using, learning about asynchronous data loading and user interface issues – will carry over, regardless of the new platform I’m using.

Now, there’s a lot that could be said against HTML5. Performance issues, compatibility, much slower user penetration, lack of features, how it’s only adding the same features and problems people criticized in Flash before. All has been said and, I’m sure, will be said as soon as HTML5 start to become a real contender and its flaws become more obvious in a real world scenario.

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. Because HTML5 will either work out or it won’t. And, as a developer, it’s not my job to root for one specific side. It’s my job to absorb whatever there’s to be absorbed and move on. Be it HTML and JavaScript, be it ActionScript, be it Silverlight, I’m pretty sure the higher-level knowledge I’ve gathered through the years that are outside the syntax realm will carry on.

I can’t be sure of what I’ll be working with in 10 years. And neither can you.