Hi Matthew,

Indeed, yes I see your point more clearly.

It's interesting, I just couldn’t have that kind of affection personally for Visual Basic for one simple reason — DLL hell. I forgot to mention this in my reply — it put me off Visual Basic and COM in general completely, and ultimately (along with reliability and security concerns) drove me away from Windows completely.

However, taking your point, for me that is Turbo Pascal 7 that holds that place for me — it was my first language, where I from age 14 was able to “learn the ropes” of coding for the very first time.

It had an amazing reliable IDE, with stepping through of code, breakpoints, etc all in DOS! The speed of it and the simplicity of it is what stirred the passion for coding for me, one that has not faded despite it being 23 years later.

Visual Basic has its place in terms of easy Windows Development, but for me, it will always fall short because of the as for mentioned DLL hell, and actually because of the drag and drop UI. I have never been a fan of drag and drop UI’s and absolute layouts, and even now in Xamarin.Forms I build my UI’s in code as its faster and allows it to be completely dynamic.

Turbo Pascal 7 for me was perfect for its time, in a DOS world there was nothing it couldn’t do, and even had proper OO support — something I discovered too late and VB6 never truly had as interfaces do not real OO make.

In someways Turbo Pascal 7 was simpler time, we didn’t have everything we have now, the internet wasn’t even readily available to the public at the time, but it did what it said on the box. It was fast. And it didn’t disappoint.

It's sad that we don’t see that much anymore. Everyones jumping onto the next thing, without stopping to consider what is best for the problem. Microsofts dev tools may not be in vogue anymore as you pointed out, but the depth of there history and the strength of there experience makes there’s still the best IMHO. And those of thus who realise that have an upper hand that others don’t even realise…