Say what you like about Visual Basic (and a lot has been said that is less than complimentary), but for a
huge number of people and workplaces this was the tool that moved people from trying to fudge Excel or Access into a workflow and actually trying to write some software.
My first language was BASIC on 8-bit machines (actually, it may have technically been Logo on a BBC, but I remember BASIC on a BBC as an 11 year old more clearly), and by the time VB came along I'd moved onto compiled languages like C and interpreted languages like Perl and PHP, and was a bit sniffy about the point and click nature of it all. I had one friend at college who refused to move on from QBASIC - I once saw him write a 3D game engine in that could about 30 frames _an hour_ on a Pentium - and the general atmosphere of being pro-FLOSS/anti-MS, plus a ton of really badly written apps encountered out in the wild when I did some small business IT consultancy made me very averse to VB in general.
But you know, it wasn't the fault of the environment or the language. It was powerful, useful and better than the alternatives for a lot of people. Its main contemporary competitor - Delphi - seemed all the rage before it didn't. And I now wish we'd been able to get a little more down the simpler visual programming domain for a while, because the modern equivalents like XCode feel massively confusing to the novice, so the learning curve feels very steep by comparison.
My first language was BASIC on 8-bit machines (actually, it may have technically been Logo on a BBC, but I remember BASIC on a BBC as an 11 year old more clearly), and by the time VB came along I'd moved onto compiled languages like C and interpreted languages like Perl and PHP, and was a bit sniffy about the point and click nature of it all. I had one friend at college who refused to move on from QBASIC - I once saw him write a 3D game engine in that could about 30 frames _an hour_ on a Pentium - and the general atmosphere of being pro-FLOSS/anti-MS, plus a ton of really badly written apps encountered out in the wild when I did some small business IT consultancy made me very averse to VB in general.
But you know, it wasn't the fault of the environment or the language. It was powerful, useful and better than the alternatives for a lot of people. Its main contemporary competitor - Delphi - seemed all the rage before it didn't. And I now wish we'd been able to get a little more down the simpler visual programming domain for a while, because the modern equivalents like XCode feel massively confusing to the novice, so the learning curve feels very steep by comparison.