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by bipin_nag 1967 days ago
>Everyone who had MS Office installed back in the 1990s (which was basically everyone) could easily run some quick VB code to try things.

Can't be everyone, how do you know the numbers? How many Office users actually used VB? MS famously stifled competition in internet browsers. 1990s numbers still won't give a fair picture.

>The Web fixed all that, albeit at the cost of cratering developer productivity, a massive increase in complexity and higher barriers to entry for new devs.

Why blame the web for higher barrier to entry. JS is doing fine. See a few surveys for popular languages:  https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...

https://madnight.github.io/githut/