[ksec]

>The most vocal, but minority of VB users wanted more advanced functionality and a more powerful/expressive language (as is often the case).

This is the single reason why most computing tools, ( not limited to VB ) never reached wide enough audience. The nerds keep asking for complexity, but the majority actually wanted even more simplicity.

HyperCard, Delphi, VB6, Flash.

[kalleboo]

I think there's a deeper problem with development tools in general:

There is no tool that goes from 0 to 100.

The tools you listed (I'd also add Excel) were great for people starting out, people who had an itch to scratch, people solving a problem. But inevitably, the programs they made worked too well, they got adopted, got added features, became mission-critical, and now outgrow the tool they were written in. And that's when you get the "nerds asking for complexity". Those people didn't start out nerds, they started out as users solving a problem, but now their little "make a formatted report out of this Excel sheet" tool is running the whole companies realtime sales forecasting and they scaled up along with the project.

I think the plan with VB.NET was that ("start out with VB and if you need it you can seamlessly graduate to C#!"), and Chris Lattner planned the same thing with Swift ("it will replace Python!") but none of those plans were ever carried out properly.

[Qwertious]

I have a theory on why: it's because the scope of a general-purpose-ish language inherently increases; there are always users that are mostly covered by the featureset, who just need one more feature and they'll be fully covered, so they'll ask for that feature. But by satisfying them, you'll bring more non-users from their nowhere-near-covered position up to the "99%-covered" boundary, and then they'll want their own last-1% feature.

The same people who want simplicity in their language/tooling also want to not learn a second almost-identical system just to achieve that last 1%, so refusing to expand your scope here isn't necessarily "optimizing for simplicity".

[ShadowBanThis01]

I worked for a company where we built a prototype for a rewrite of their flagship product in VB. Meanwhile a big team of programmers implemented the “production” version in VC++. But at that time a bunch of the controls available in VB were not in VC, so they lagged quite a bit. Of course management saw the prototype working (it was a CRUD app for property management) and said why not just use this. The C++ programmers turned up their noses at working in VB and were summarily fired, leaving me and a team of contractors to finish the job. 100% the right business decision and a good lesson on getting too precious with your tech.

[makeitdouble]

> The nerds

The people with money really. Few people care what the nerds complain about, but Microsoft will listen to Fortune 500 companies that hold thousands of top tier paying users and their complaints about how such or such feature would help them save days of work every months.

This the ultimate "vote with your wallet" I think, those with bigger wallets will have bigger votes.

[glenngillen]

An unfortunate byproduct of this, that I think is an unpopular opinion in these parts, is increased in product analytics/telemetry. People eventually learn that the feedback you receive re your product only rarely reflects the experience of the majority of users.

[antupis]

Adding features to a popular tool later can make it messy. Building a tool where you can add features easily makes it elegant eg Lisp.