The pascal language requires things to be declared in a certain order. It's a bit awkward some of the time bit it enables the compiler to work in a single pass. This meant that running an application was extremely fast by any standards and this really made it stand out compared to other development tools out there.
VB created applications that had to ship with a shared runtime library. Windows wasn't great at versioning these libraries so developers often shipped their own VB runtime with their executable. The executable was small and the runtime was comparatively huge which had a negative impact on user perception when downloading the installers.
Before moving on to Microsoft in 1996, Anders Heilsberg was the Chief Engineer at Borland that oversaw the development and release of Delphi 1.0.
For years, VB felt like an application that could make deployable versions of itself. Delphi felt like a programming environment that compiled code into applications.
After Heilsberg moved to MS, a lot of improvements were made in VB that utlimately made Delphi less attractive, especially during Borland's strategic waffling known as "The Inprise Years": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland#Inprise_Corporation_Er...
If you want to get a feel for what it was like then check out the FOSS clone "Lazarus".
> After Heilsberg moved to MS, a lot of improvements were made in VB that utlimately made Delphi less attractive
Well, not actually. With Anders' move to Microsoft, VB6 (aka, VB "classic") was discontinued. Microsoft supported Visual Basic syntax on the .NET runtime, but the vast majority of VB programmers considered this to be a different language because developing for the .NET Framework (remember this is ~2001) was a huge departure from VB Classic.
Many VB developers petitioned Microsoft to open-source VB6 or continue releasing improvements on it. Microsoft did not and chose to continue with their .NET + C# strategy.
There's a bit of a gap there though between 1996 and Visual Basic classic being discontinued. VB.NET came out in 2002 but VB6 was supported until 2008.
VB5 in 1997 and VB6 in 1998 really closed the gap with Delphi from what I remember.
VB5/6 had native code compilers. Performance wise, the gap was reduced.
But it still was only object based and not full OOP, VCL was much better in all respects, so were the GUI builders. The component ecosystem was much better, despite having a much smaller user base. I prefer not to use Object Pascal today, but back then, it was superior to using VC++ or VB.
VB6 was my last VB. It came at just the time when getting a computer onto a network to download and install a giant distribution was touch and go. The building where I worked didn't have networking in the labs, the "labs" were whatever space we could find, and the "lab computers" were old cast-offs retired from office use. It meant that supporting VB.NET with a brand spankin new networked computer wasn't a safe assumption.
At the same time, I was playing with Linux at home, and wanted tooling that could run on either platform. I learned Python at home, and then made the switch at work.
One of my last VB6 apps, thousands of lines, has been running in the plant without issue for 15 years. On one occasion I had to bump up the declared sizes of some fixed length arrays.
As for GUIs, I never found anything close to VB, but also decided to just write a thin wrapper around Tkinter and let my layout be generated automatically by default. I haven't missed laying out my GUIs, which were always a hodgepodge anyway.
> After Heilsberg moved to MS, a lot of improvements were made in VB that utlimately made Delphi less attractive, especially during Borland's strategic waffling known as "The Inprise Years": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland#Inprise_Corporation_Er...
VB created applications that had to ship with a shared runtime library. Windows wasn't great at versioning these libraries so developers often shipped their own VB runtime with their executable. The executable was small and the runtime was comparatively huge which had a negative impact on user perception when downloading the installers.
Before moving on to Microsoft in 1996, Anders Heilsberg was the Chief Engineer at Borland that oversaw the development and release of Delphi 1.0.
For years, VB felt like an application that could make deployable versions of itself. Delphi felt like a programming environment that compiled code into applications.
After Heilsberg moved to MS, a lot of improvements were made in VB that utlimately made Delphi less attractive, especially during Borland's strategic waffling known as "The Inprise Years": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland#Inprise_Corporation_Er...
If you want to get a feel for what it was like then check out the FOSS clone "Lazarus".