Bill Gates demonstrates Visual Basic (1991) (opens in new tab)

This is how I learned to code. Ot was excellent. Its been very hard over the course of my career to learn other non basic languages, and I attribute it largely to those help files being so good that it became my first and main language.

Visual Basic was one of the first languages I learned, and I was able to quickly make complex graphical applications.

I feel like we have regressed in a lot of ways.

Contrast building a GUI app in 1990 vs 2020.

Compare Visual Basic to something like React Native.

How much code would you have to write for some basic business application, like having a few screens that share a state, and interface with a database? How big would the executable be?

Visual Basic had some big flaws, but you could work around those flaws. And I can also explain the logic of a Visual Basic program fairly easily to someone inexperienced. And there is just so much less cognitive load involved. I feel like 90% of the actual code that I wrote was for actually processing data. Sure, asynchronous stuff could get difficult in VB, but that was the exception. And I wish that VB had had reducers.

I am certain that virtualizing the x86 Visual Basic 6 runtime in Javascript would easier to develop for and outperform many modern GUI frameworks today.