Yet another interesting benefit of/interesting feature of VB is that it was the Python of its day in terms of the "there's a library to do that" factor. Not on

Yet another interesting benefit of/interesting feature of VB is that it was the Python of its day in terms of the "there's a library to do that" factor. Not only was it easy to pick up, but (while not built-in like Python) it had access to thousands and thousands of easy to install and easy to use ActiveX libraries. There was almost always an ActiveX Library to suit your needs, ready to literally drop into the WYSIWYG editor and use. That combined with the easy to use WYSIWYG editor and the edit and continue functionality were, to me, what made it such an amazingly useful language for creating quick utilities or small programs. It was truly a "Rapid Application Development" language. I also saw some nightmares in my days, though I don't blame VB as much as the people who created the app. The most notable one was a document management system that I'd been asked to port from VB3 to VB6 (so that it could run on win32 among other reasons) and to turn the system from a batch system for document processing facilities into a desktop DMS for home use. I will never forget when I opened up the project and there were 60 some-odd "forms" in it, and when I opened any one of them up not a single one defined a variable. They all - every last one - was defined as a global variable in a single globals.bas file. There were thousands of global variables. Every single one in the entire application declared there, and edited at will in any of the myriad forms wherever they fancied. My first task became "untangle the global variable mess."