[dachris]

Started the Visual Basic dev env, added a button to the form, MsgBox "Hello World", and it worked.

So simple, so easy. Those were the days.

[pjmlp]

You can still have that experience with VB.NET, C#, Delphi, FreePascal, Gambas, Xojo and C++ Builder.

Instead folks go with Electron crap.

[anthk]

TCL/Tk too, albeit being far less intuitive than Lazarus+FreePascal. Altough it has far less code, so it's a draw on difficulty. The average Joe would just spend time measuring the sizes of the frames and that's it.

[pjmlp]

In a sense yeah, but as far as I remember it never had a good UI designer.

[zabzonk]

Well, MessageBox() in the Win32 API is just a simple C function call: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/...

I wrote a blog about this many years ago: https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/simple-windows-dial...

[dcrazy]

It’s everything leading up to the MessageBox() call that VB makes trivial.