The language was crap - the IDE/designer was excellent. For me - the sweet-spot that I used for all of my own personal projects after outgrowing VB1-6 was... B

The language was crap - the IDE/designer was excellent. For me - the sweet-spot that I used for all of my own personal projects after outgrowing VB1-6 was... Borland Delphi. The IDE/designer was at least as good as VB - but the Object Pascal language was so powerful. It was truely object-oriented and if one wanted, one could work at a high level of abstraction. Yet it could also natively drop-down to low-level Windows API's, and handle pointer-based work if necessary. Unfortunately - for my professional career, Delphi never captured the large-scale Enterprise market - that went to .NET or Java and the rest is history... (Occasionally I noodle about with FreePascal for the nostalgia factor)