I like Retool, but having used both (VB for nearly a decade in the 90s, till .Net came along), and I don't think the comparison is accurate.
Visual Basic represented the high-water mark for developer productivity[1] when it came to small/medium apps. And that's not just Forms apps. You could build a TCP server on it. You could build embeddable COM components, embed a Web Browser, do Distributed Transactions, make a System tray app, connect to any database that you choose, Web Apps, etc. It had a great interop story with COM/C++ code (which allowed you to do embed stuff like, say Telephony, with just a few lines of code).
There's truly a market for a reincarnation of VB. I don't think Retool would be that, because the capabilities will never align. VB is much "lower level" relatively, and that was its strength.
[1]: As long as you stuck to Windows, which was the case in the 90s.
Yes, certainly! "VB in the cloud" is a pretty good description of Retool. (I think we're a quite a bit more developer friendly, but it's certainly 80% correct.)
VB was definitely "business oriented scripter" friendly. When I needed to do something that felt more like programming than scripting it annoyed the hell out of me.
Note: It was still awesome overall, and the time I spent swearing at it for the complex logic parts was more than worth it for the time and pain I saved elsewhere, but I think that's what the retool founder's trying to gesture at.
Retool definitely has similarities to Visual Basic. Actually we are also trying to build a spiritual successor to Visual Basic at Appshare.co, but we still have a long way to go. I think that Retool is far more like a polished RAD tool right now than Appshare as a SQL Builder tool however, so really happy to see this investment and wish them best of luck!
Visual Basic represented the high-water mark for developer productivity[1] when it came to small/medium apps. And that's not just Forms apps. You could build a TCP server on it. You could build embeddable COM components, embed a Web Browser, do Distributed Transactions, make a System tray app, connect to any database that you choose, Web Apps, etc. It had a great interop story with COM/C++ code (which allowed you to do embed stuff like, say Telephony, with just a few lines of code).
There's truly a market for a reincarnation of VB. I don't think Retool would be that, because the capabilities will never align. VB is much "lower level" relatively, and that was its strength.
[1]: As long as you stuck to Windows, which was the case in the 90s.