A few thoughts - loved VB and made my first money as a high schooler by programming in it. As far as I can recall it was the only programming language that let

A few thoughts - loved VB and made my first money as a high schooler by programming in it. As far as I can recall it was the only programming language that let you begin by laying out the UI and then wire up the code later. Like your project started up with a blank Windows window. You drag a button or a text area and you hit Run and your app right away has a window, a button and a text area. To write code for the button click, you click the button in the editor and write it. A few years later jBuilder (I think) allowed you to do something like with Java, that though not as simply. I am not aware of any dev tooling that offers that today. I suspect a few things happened that made VB go away. I think VB was aimed at one-man dev, not sure how it would work with revision control and team development (eg when u think of your project as a window you drag stuff onto, how do you deal with merge diffs etc.) I also think the world migrated to more client server / web stuff around this time, while VB was very married to a standalone windows app. And then on the flip side, probably coding became stronger in excel so some of the stuff moved there. VB was amazing, such a pleasure to create in.