My favorite part about Visual Basic was the help files. They were absolutely great for someone learning to code. From what I remember, there was a snippet of example code for basically everything.
This is how I learned to code. Ot was excellent. Its been very hard over the course of my career to learn other non basic languages, and I attribute it largely to those help files being so good that it became my first and main language.
Visual Basic was one of the first languages I learned, and I was able to quickly make complex graphical applications.
I feel like we have regressed in a lot of ways.
Contrast building a GUI app in 1990 vs 2020.
Compare Visual Basic to something like React Native.
How much code would you have to write for some basic business application, like having a few screens that share a state, and interface with a database? How big would the executable be?
Visual Basic had some big flaws, but you could work around those flaws. And I can also explain the logic of a Visual Basic program fairly easily to someone inexperienced. And there is just so much less cognitive load involved. I feel like 90% of the actual code that I wrote was for actually processing data. Sure, asynchronous stuff could get difficult in VB, but that was the exception. And I wish that VB had had reducers.
I am certain that virtualizing the x86 Visual Basic 6 runtime in Javascript would easier to develop for and outperform many modern GUI frameworks today.
The '90s were full of ballyhoo about object orientation and "soon we'll be bolting together software with off-the-shelf components."
Thanks to the failure to standardize C++ ABIs (among other reasons) that didn't happen... except for VBXs. You really could throw together a CRUD app pretty quickly with off-the-shelf VBX controls.
