There are more or less 2 major modes of managing a product relative to the current technological zeitgeist:
- expand to consume every new use case and buzzword that comes along. Survive in some form indefinitely, while the product becomes less concrete and meaningful over time. The product continues to succeed not because it is technically best in class any more, but sheer momentum of the large base of existing users it serves adequately
- remain focused to the original mission, delivering iterative improvements over time. Watch waves of loyal users get eaten away one after another by the tide of the current technological buzz
VB was mostly the second case, although it did have many cousins in the form of VBA and ASP. The original tool - VB itself, was only ever relevant to desktop computing. By the time it got merged into Visual Studio, I believe the RAD aspect of the tool had already mostly disappeared (although VS even today still offers some variety of the original experience!)
VB in its prime was a beautiful thing, and the experience AFAIK remains unmatched to this very day. I've pined for a "client/server VB" on many occasions.
The powerful RAD from VB continued into C# and .NET. You could in first versions of VS.NET and still today with UWP just drag out a button, double click it to perform some action, hit F5 for close to instant compile and launch and then edit the code while debugging. As others noted, the problem is not the tool, the problem is the lack of interest in desktop apps today.
Agree about the experience being unmatched. Compare it to Android Studio which is supposed to be the modern flagship from the competition, even 15 year old versions of Visual Studio provides much smoother RAD experience. No matter how good code editing in IntelliJ is, everything around it with gradle slowness and app relaunches just makes you look back and wonder what happened to technological progress.
- expand to consume every new use case and buzzword that comes along. Survive in some form indefinitely, while the product becomes less concrete and meaningful over time. The product continues to succeed not because it is technically best in class any more, but sheer momentum of the large base of existing users it serves adequately
- remain focused to the original mission, delivering iterative improvements over time. Watch waves of loyal users get eaten away one after another by the tide of the current technological buzz
VB was mostly the second case, although it did have many cousins in the form of VBA and ASP. The original tool - VB itself, was only ever relevant to desktop computing. By the time it got merged into Visual Studio, I believe the RAD aspect of the tool had already mostly disappeared (although VS even today still offers some variety of the original experience!)
VB in its prime was a beautiful thing, and the experience AFAIK remains unmatched to this very day. I've pined for a "client/server VB" on many occasions.