[hghid]

Visual Basic was an incredible leap forward in programming in that it made programming accessible to much wider range of people. People that just wanted to make a computer perform a task without necessarily writing a commercial product or changing the world. Being a child of the 70's/80's, I was fortunate enough to learn by just diving in and writing Basic on a BBC Model B. I think the problem people have with BASIC is the 'B' for Beginner. It created a lot of snobbery. I remember being amazed when Windows came out because it brought a level of consistency to everyday software which meant that by and large you could get the basics of a piece of software without a manual. Before VB, there was a huge barrier to programming in Windows because for a long time it was C which, for all it's power, is not a language many people should be using. I suspect a lot of people here won't have experienced starting with an empty Window, dropping a Button on it, double clicking the Button and being dropped straight into the event handler code. It was a revelation. Especially when you realised that you got access to all of the other Windows goodies like printing, database access etc just by dropping a control onto a Form. Software development now is a long way away from the ease of access that VB gave us and is probably poorer for it.

[akrymski]

Isn't there still Visual Basic.NET? Along with a C# version, it had all the VB UI goodies as far as I recall.

MS also had some awesome tech around DCOM in VB - transparent RRC was very futuristic at the time.