I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead.
Think about that for a moment: We've regressed from VB.
The usual tradeoff is: easy to write, hard to extend and maintain. But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain.
We have some of the smartest people in the world in our industry, and evidently we're all idiots.
I know once I've tested it on one machine it's going to work fine on all the other ones. It's the most stable API and platform I've ever seen. Code we wrote for Windows NT4 works fine on Windows 8.1 and behaves exactly the same.
Compare that to our poor web guy who spends at least 50% of his time trying to get everything working on a selection of browsers going from IE6 to the latest Chrome while necking red bull, using the F word a lot, smoking and going bright purple.
No, beginners don't want to layout things in CSS, a declarative XML language, or any other 'text' way. They want to drag and drop components with the sort of ease of use that Visual Studio or Interface Builder offer. And they want a language coupled with that which features the simplicity of Python.
I too did some of my first serious programming in a VB like language in the 90s (RealBasic for Mac). I now develop beginner training materials in web development as a side gig and while we have fun - it's definitely not as satisfying as laying out a form in VB and having a real GUI in a matter of minutes that "Just Works."
The zealotry in this field is getting close to unsustainable in my opinion. Companies thought the proliferation of ms access apps was bad, wait until they try to do something with the proliferation of overarchitected web apps based on a wide assortment of fashionable at the time but now unpopular languages and frameworks that hardly anyone has experience on and is most certainly not interested in working on.
Working in SF in earlier-stage companies, I've never seen anything even close to the rigor with which Microsoft approached testing. Definitely consider working there if you want to learn from some of the best QA/QE/verification engineers in the industry.
I think the most important issues with the web that are not already being addressed (and winning) are a statically typed Javascript replacement and a way to locally isolate the effect of CSS in large applications with many modules (web components don't solve this correctly).
The web is distributed and distributed is hard. The problem is that it is also what people want. We haven't regressed from VB6 -- we've advanced, but the demands of the market may have gotten more complicated faster than the popular tools have advanced in their ability to simplify them.
I keep thinking back to an Access application that I threw together in a couple of days, back in the 90s for managing a team of about 40 technicians. It was being used for task tracking, and had some wiki-like features as well. When I started that project I knew nothing about Access or VB, and yet in two days I had a bunch of forms and tables that allowed managers to get a quick feel for what their staff were up to. The thing ran over the LAN, and could handle 10 simultaneous connections without any dramas. If I were to try the same thing in the web world, I might lose myself in getting just one table view working correctly for a week. Getting an http server configured and up and running, and talking to a db server would be at least two days. And there would be many potential roadblocks just waiting to trip me up along the way.
These days, rather than dealing with that mess, many companies just go for an off-the-shelf hosted solution that sort of fits their needs, such as Basecamp, or Jira, or Igloo. The existence of these products is a sign that we've gone off in the wrong direction somewhere - the sorts of products they make are very similar to that online apps you could make with Access 20 years ago.
A lot of the internal desktop LOB application development that used to happen in VB or Delphi still is done on the desktop, but happens in Excel with VBScript. That trend was very much visible when VB (pre-VB.NET) was still current.
