On my first day, I found a book on my desk—"Learn Visual Basic 3 in 21 Days"—along with a brand new 486DX250 and a 14" monitor. I learned a lot quickly! We answered support queries by fax back then.
I never fully understood why this programming paradigm died off. Building business apps beyond Access or Excel was so straightforward. It was great to get an .EXE that you could package up with InstallShield or Wise Solutions and send to anyone.
I guess the web came soon after, and trying to do WYSIWYG for HTML and CSS has never gone well—even today.
FrontPage came out but died soon after, and mixing desktop apps with web apps was never great.
Today, I feel .NET is overly complex and much harder for beginners compared to the old days.
Sometimes, I think there are only so many ways to control the appearance of business apps. I'd constrain visuals but provide the most straightforward visual builder possible.
The No-Code world is fascinating, and the best I've seen in this space is https://retool.com/, but it's expensive and locks you into their ecosystem.
Even today, small businesses need to build out simple apps that were simple to do back in the Visual Basic days—a stock control system, a basic support system, sales tools, etc. Today, it's a minefield of options that can quickly get expensive.
I'd love to have a visual builder that creates code you can host yourself — something like retool.com but with open source and self-hosting, or maybe I'm just too old for this now! :)