[deweywsu]

Nothing compared then or since to VB 6's ease of layout and GUI-centered approach. It was a language that was easy to use and WAY less complicated than C#. To me, complicated is a huge drawback. Give me just enough tools to make something that works. VB6 was absolutely fantastic for prototyping. I have absolutely no need for 200 methods for every expression that I have to go lookup every time (this is why IntelliSense even exists), having to think about bullshit like "syntactic sugar", aka "the only way to do something because it's otherwise too hard to remember", which to be fair started with javascript frameworks, but applies equally well to .NET.

The whole dot paradigm took a group of people who were very comfortable with a language and tried to turn their brains inside out. Ex: x.ToString doesn't have the same intuitive recognition as Str(x), nor can Str(x) be as easily muddled together with 3 other methods. Call it simple and meaningless, but .NET is profuse with these turnarounds, and they required people to re-learn everything, even the simple stuff. .NET adds layers of complexity by enabling super-spiffy compact writing of multiple operations with complex operators all on the same line that is far too easy to get lost in and that frankly, is unnecessary. I'm talking about things like delegates, lambda expressions, extension methods, and async/await. These are cute if you're super nerdy, but for most of the rest of the world they take something that was easy to use and contort it into an unrecognizable mess.

VB6 was just complex enough and graphics-centered and they moved it to a hugely overly complex and language-centered model. It made no sense to me. Of course, everyone who thought "real" programming should be harder embraced C# like it was manna from God, and this by and large is the thinking that killed VB6. It was a complete paradigm shift in the wrong direction for visual thinkers.