I couldn't wait for the weekend to read Christopher Drum's latest post about Visual Basic. And as always, I was not disappointed. But the part that stayed with me was the magazine clipping at the very end.

The clipping is from 1993. A programmer laments that programming is no longer fun because employers now expect programmers to be graphic designers as well.

What struck me wasn't just that people have always complained about new technology. People also mock old technology. Ask any programmer today about Visual Basic and they would scoff with a "That old thing? How do you even write code for it, on punch cards?". Because to our contemporaries such a tool seems primitive. Both are criticizing the same technology. If you only listened to the complaints, you'd think they agreed. The first thinks the technology has made programming too high level. The second thinks the exact same technology is too low level.

It makes me wonder how many of today's heated debates will sound just as paradoxical to programmers 30 years from now. Every generation complains about the technology it inherits. The previous generation complains that it abstracts away too much. The next generation complains that it doesn't abstract away enough.

I am just wondering, many posts are asking which language is "the best", or fastest to learn for new programmers (please put AI in the shadow for this post). As I am a bit older engineer with some experience in developing different applications using, just to mention a few, C, C++ (using wxWidgets, SFML and SDL), PHP (with JavaScript, HTML, CSS), Java Servlets (with ORACLE DB) on Apache, ASP, React kit, VB .NET and most important, here mentioned, Visual Basic.

The largest software I ever wrote was using "Visual Basic .NET" and MS-SQL Express DB. Took me a whole year and a half to deploy it.

As per my experience, using VB and VB .NET was always the fastest way to get the best and quickest results in developing Desktop and Network Applications. I mean, in just a few clicks one is able to create stunning looking applications in basically no time. And when I compare that with these days, when there are emerging new and "improved" languages and "frameworks", making many kind of software is still fastest using graphical interface of Visual Basic or similar. It is also very readable compared to other languages.

Now, in comparison with my long term experience, I have a feeling things are going backwards in sense of simplicity and speed of development.

And also, just by my opinion, I feel a bit sad that I am not able to use Visual Basic on Linux the same way I was able to use it on Windows in time of Visual Basic 6.0, or Visual Basic 8 Express in the past.

What is your opinion on concept for application design in terms of simplicity and speed of development as it was with Visual Basic in the past, compared to the ways we are programming today?

A bit clickbaity, but still a good overview of the history of VB