They talk about Rapid Application Development, and it makes me sad. It makes me sad because I still haven't found a RAD tool that works on the same level of Visual Basic.

Forgetting all the things Visual Basic did wrong, the biggest thing it did right was the UI builder. When you put a button on the screen, it wrote the code for you. When you put a text box on the screen, it wrote the code for you. When you double click the button in the designer, it takes you to the code for that button. You select "onClick" and type "textbox1 = "Hello world!". Save and run, click the button, and the textbox says "Hello world!".

VB made UI easy. Glade is nice, but it still doesn't come close to the ease of use that VB brought to the market. I don't know of anything else that has since. VB was a ecosystem that let accountants build software. With all the bad that comes with the good, this is still unmatched as far as my research has shown me.