[carra]

Things like Borland C and VB/WinForms really do take me to a simpler time. There was joy in being able to write simple programs very fast, in a more intuitive way, without needing to use browsers or frameworks or writing shaders to do the simplest things. Current systems are more powerful and versatile for sure, but for a teenager curious for coding they are a much less welcoming environment in a lot of ways. The ever growing amount of technologies you need to learn now does not help either.

[supportengineer]

Another aspect of the sheer number of technologies that you have to use is that you can’t do very much as a solo developer. It introduces a social aspect. You must work as part of a team. Especially when you have a public facing website or large scale. So the field is less appealing for someone who is a typical introvert. The types of personalities are completely different compared to those from the mid-90s or before.

[aadhavans]

I was talking about this with a friend earlier this week. The people who work in software these days seem much more extroverted and outgoing than the 'introverted nerd' stereotype from the 90s.

[niutech]

You can still run Visual Basic 6 in Windows 11 and compile programs like in '99. Windows is incredibly backwards-compatible.

[christophilus]

VB6 was a revelation to me, coming from C and C++ at the time. It was so much easier and still plenty performant for the kinds of little business applications I was building at the time.

[never_inline]

Try flutter.

[niutech]

Flutter is not native on any platform, it's just a canvas with painted custom controls. Nothing compared to lightweight native Win32 apps in VB6.