[jeswin]

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.