When the team at Microsoft decided to call their text editor Visual Studio which bit of it did they suppose was especially ‘visual’?
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@urlyman I think it was the code syntax highlighting and navigation, which was quite sophisticated (though not unprecedented) at the time. Also, as others have pointed out, 'Visual' was a fashion statement back then.
@urlyman It got that name just as it could have been called "Outlook Code" or "Copilot". Mood of the day.
@urlyman visual studio added their latest attempt at wysiwyg. It was horrible, but less horrible than visual basic's wysiwyg. Both were unusable and quickly forgotten.
![[object Object]](https://media.mas.to/accounts/avatars/109/287/758/133/964/366/original/0f3099c0adfb36a0.png "[object Object]")
…and if VS Code is the *visual* rendering of code, wtaf were they doing before?
Uttering incantations and offering up human sacrifices while blindfold?
…This has bugged me for years but only now have I asked it
@urlyman I think it's just continuing the branding of their dev tools, starting from Visual Basic (which integrated a UI designer). They then added Visual {C,C++,J,F#,C#} and Visual Source Safe (which wasn't particularly safe). Visual Studio is simply carrying on in that tradition.
