Knowing you could have line numbers in VB6 is a great bit of knowledge for showing you really were there ....

VB was a great tool. Like Access, it often times takes the blame for management issues at companies. Enterprising employee X hits on an idea of automating some boring, tedious, and error prone part of their job, so they slap together a quick proof of concept type app in VB6 or Access. App works great, then employee leaves or the company won't shell out to take their prototype app and have it turned into something a bit more proper. Over time the process might drift and/or Windows is updated, and the prototype app slowly starts breaking little by little until people just see some generic error about the VB6 runtime or Access and blame the tool.

Blame the craftsman/woman's patron, not the tool or craftsman/woman.

No offence, but being a professional programmer specialising in "Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code" will always sound a bit... erm... controversial.

Because using niche specialist languages is such a great success ?

BASIC though was really built at a time when very few programmers were around. Pretty much everyone was a beginner or a white coated boffin. Even in 71 or so when I was taught programming at school most of it was in low-level numeric form. BASIC opened up programme writing to the masses. They were all beginners, almost by definition.

...and it's never really been successfully replaced. What we usually see is some sort of Introduction to Coding being used with a "black box", point and click, drag the various boxes around to make a "program" type things, followed by some sort of actually programming language where it takes a week or two to tech the kids how to use the overly complex IDE.

There may well be something out there already, but if not, the equivalent of ROM BASIC from an early 8-bit computer with simple on screen editing, interpretive BASIC would be better IMHO. Maybe something along the lines of BBC BASIC with functions and procedures, WHILE/WEND, REPEAT/UNTIL constructs and sound/graphics commands leading from simple to more advanced concepts. Oh, and a proper, printed manual listing all the commands with working examples :-)

BASIC was designed to help young students become programmers, normally often moving on to other languages once they understood what they were doing and got a job. Certainly BASIC has a lot of issues but once you manage to write completely functional BASIC code then it's quite easy to learn another language in a day or two.

I've seen PhD researchers in completely unrelated non-computing areas quickly figure out how to write something that they need in BASIC - maybe BASIC's not "great" but it gets the job done.

Never judge a book by its cover, never judge a programming language by its name. :)

Or by its intended purpose. People whip up applications in systems programming language C too.

There's this too - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xojo

It was formerly called REALBasic but was renamed.

I have no idea how good it is. I tried the Windows version and it had the fetid stench of Mac software ported to Windows but that was a loooooong loooong time ago, probably when it was still called REALBasic.

I'm sure there was a REALBasic, although maybe with different capitalisation, long before Macs. Probably on CP/M.

I really enjoyed my time doing VB6. I thought it was a lovely language for the mundane, and for causal programmers. It was easy to use and simple enough, even if the ultra-hardcore didn't like it, the elitists sneered at its "BASIC" naming and heritage.

REALbasic was what I moved to when VB6 was no more and because of its cross-platform capabilities. It was okay but expensive to licence and the developers seemed more focused on new features and releases than bug fixing. I can't speak for the Xojo incarnation having never used it but it's where I'd probably head if I wanted to relive the VB6 experience. I believe there's a free version for Raspberry Pi.

RAD Basic has probably missed its window of opportunity - its failed Kickstarter demonstrates that, and is doomed to go nowhere if not free to use, if it ever gets out of Alpha.

All the cool kids have moved on to Python and Qt, or are resigned to whatever -dot-Net.

I still have VB6 installed on my Windows 10 PC because I can't be bothered to port code which has worked for years to something else.

Many times, one simply has a job to do and neither the time nor the resources to spend months or years on a "proper" development project or (over)generalization to things other than relieving the immediate pain at hand. With two colleagues I once threw er, put together a little system (a mixture of VB2, SQL, and Excel macros) that provided a way of solving the "46 Million Dollar Problem" at my division of a huge manufacturing company. The Division General Manager said our duct-tape, chewing-gum, and bailing-wire tool was the single biggest factor that saved the division's bacon. We put it together in two days. Corporate IT wanted to schedule a four-month analysis and eight-month development project requiring around twenty people and, oh yeah, they couldn't get to it for at least six months. We would have been out of business by then.

Think of BASIC et. al. as a tool for the ER versus something for the medical specialist.

HP Basic was a very powerful system ostensibly for controlling scientific instruments but quite useful for other tasks.

Similarly, Microware OS-9 (NOT Mac OS9) provided a similar advanced basic on a very Unix-like system that ran on 6809-based micros including the late, lamented Radio Shack Color Computer.

Don't forget GAMBAS for current VB-like BASICs. FOSS and cross-platform.

Call me stupid, but public releases that you can't download are like, weird.

There are three things that will never die for good; Visual Basic 6.0, Internet Explorer and COBOL.

Our ERP system provider has got rid of the first (allegedly), is working on the second but COBOL is too firmly rooted.

Once you break the fundamental difference between 1:1 of machine code and 1:many of a high level language, you're pretty much arguing over the price.

There's nothing you can't do in VB6 that you could do in any other language, as long as you were prepared to import the DLLs and fudge the data structures. Although I admit the fun factor does vary.

Hell, I clearly remember subclassing in VB6 to remove the resize arrows over a form.

I wish I could remember the key points of computing ... repetition, concatenation, expansion, decision and ?????