I'll always fondly remember Visual Basic as the language that let me make real Windows applications with the language I already knew and understood. I was just

I'll always fondly remember Visual Basic as the language that let me make real Windows applications with the language I already knew and understood. I was just a kid, maybe 10 or 12, when I learned to program with QBASIC and later VB5. I remember strongly feeling that a ".bas" file wasn't a real program. I so much wanted to be able to run my programs as real .EXE files. There was some kind of QBASIC compiler that made an .EXE but I felt like that was just... still not real enough. That desire for making a real bonafide .EXE was one of the driving reasons I (tried to) learn C.