[plainnoodles]

A company I used to work for took roughly this path:

1. 1 mildly technical, mostly business-domain person, a spreadsheet + auto-clickers

2. 1.5 persons still only mildly technical and mostly business-domain-y, a VB gui and some basic network integration

3. [some time and quite a bit of revenue passes]

4. they hire some java programmers to rewrite it properly in Swing, since the VB versions had literally become impossible to modify without breaking (there were forked versions where you used version A for some feature, version B for another, version C for another - and people had tried to merge them together while keeping the whole thing working, but never managed it).

It's now been, oh, over a decade I suppose, and while I understand that there are currently some efforts underway to port the java applications to an SPA web app, it's more because the owner wants to get rid of java (and only have to hire python devs) than because the apps don't work or are hard to maintain.

My point is that without VB, the company probably wouldn't have existed to even need the Swing rewrite. So while I personally find VB to be quite caustic to my senses, I cannot deny its ability to create business value, especially because it's so approachable only mildly-technical folks.

[albrewer]

The company I used to work at started out in MS BASIC sometime in the early 80's. The founder is a mechanical engineer who started programming all the formulas he was using instead of cranking them by hand every time. In the 90's, he ported it to VB and turned it into a GUI application for Windows 3.1. In the early 00's, the company had to switch over to using C++ for a fair amount of the UI, but the core off the application is still that library of VB code (now VB.NET) that was started in the 80's, and the RAD tools for VB was what allowed them to stand out as a mechanical design program earlier than most of the other tools.