It's probably a mistake to think these technologies failed. You won't find many programmers who consider VB and Access tools of choice, but a lot of people have

It's probably a mistake to think these technologies failed. You won't find many programmers who consider VB and Access tools of choice, but a lot of people have gotten a lot of use out of them in business. If it's possible to make a general-purpose programming tool that's reasonably accessible to non-programmers that programmers won't hate, I don't think anybody has come very close yet. DSLs may be the best we can do.