Alan Cooper

Inventor of Visual Basic, Cooper is sometimes called "the father of Visual Basic," although much of the work on Visual Basic was done by Microsoft's internal development group. Cooper was the leading force behind Visual Basic 1.0 and pioneered the use of an IDE to create a GUI via wrapped calls to system routines in the API (see Adapter pattern).

Cooper's original programs were called "Tripod" and later "Ruby". They were intended as more of an end-user tool, but development at Microsoft led to Visual Basic becoming a tool for programmers instead.

An advocate of interaction design, Cooper runs a design company and writes books about how to make software user interfaces more usable by addressing the user's goals.