I was a VB developer when that all went down. VB didn't fall out of favor, Microsoft killed it. When .NET came along MS replaced "classic" VB with VB.NET, whic

I was a VB developer when that all went down. VB didn't fall out of favor, Microsoft killed it. When .NET came along MS replaced "classic" VB with VB.NET, which was syntactically just different enough from classic VB to make moving to it a big project. Worse, VB.NET wasn't backwards-compatible with classic VB, so you couldn't just bring your old projects into the new environment; you had to rewrite them from the ground up in the new syntax. Worse still, to encourage VB devs to move to VB.NET, Microsoft stopped selling licenses for classic VB. Not "warned developers they would stop selling licenses in five years" or the like, mind. They just stopped. If you wanted to buy a license for VB, it was VB.NET or nothing. Which, when you considered that VB.NET wouldn't run all your old code, was kind of terrifying. All of which amounted to dropping a nuclear bomb on the VB community, as it pushed everyone into doing what someone (I think Joel Spolsky) once called "the dreaded market survey." In other words, if you're going to have to learn a whole new language in a hurry anyway, why not consider all the new languages available to you? So while a few classic VB devs did move to VB.NET, most ended up landing elsewhere; some to C#, some to web application platforms like ColdFusion, some to open-source languages like Perl, etc. (I went to Perl, which led me to PHP, which led me to Python.) What had been one of the world's largest programming communities was scattered to the four winds overnight.