Yes, I would agree with "industrial", especially since you can link with any C library after translating the headers with SWIG (translations of common libraries like C, winapi and GTK are included with FB). I've never used/don't know VB, but it appears that quite a lot of FB's design is borrowed from it. In recent years FB has been focused on borrowing C++ features instead (and even aiming to be ABI compatible with g++, not sure if that works). E.g. recently added "dim byref" (like a C++ reference variable) and polymorphism + RTTI. Sometimes things move in the other direction, like binary literals new in C++14 :)