Yet I can't help wondering what problems it had that caused them to abandon it?
Tech comes and goes, there’s nothing to vb specifically. As a language it’s pretty limited, tedious and quirky.
Moreover, why hasn't someone come out with a solid replacement?
Because webdev at its core is a community of stubborn smart guys who love the complexity and hate dull business code. They will present absurd arguments like I can do this and that, as if it couldn’t be packed into a vb component and drag-dropped onto a form from a palette without accompanying 1kloc boilerplate and pages of configuration documentation with no sane defaults. VB GUI model may be obsolete, gray and non-responsive, but no one prevents from building responsive interfaces wysiwyg way. My peer web designer does it without bothering with html/css much and it works for her for decades. All the tech is there, it’s just nobody’s collective interest to combine it into a business RAD instead of an intermediate haskell-level mindfuck starter kit. You can’t burn hundreds of millions doing actual work on a platform that everyone could start using solo in just a few days and deliver a working solution next week, even if raw and clumsy as it usually goes with non-pros.
I’d like to get a better and less bitter explanation, but there is none.
Tech comes and goes, there’s nothing to vb specifically. As a language it’s pretty limited, tedious and quirky.
Moreover, why hasn't someone come out with a solid replacement?
Because webdev at its core is a community of stubborn smart guys who love the complexity and hate dull business code. They will present absurd arguments like I can do this and that, as if it couldn’t be packed into a vb component and drag-dropped onto a form from a palette without accompanying 1kloc boilerplate and pages of configuration documentation with no sane defaults. VB GUI model may be obsolete, gray and non-responsive, but no one prevents from building responsive interfaces wysiwyg way. My peer web designer does it without bothering with html/css much and it works for her for decades. All the tech is there, it’s just nobody’s collective interest to combine it into a business RAD instead of an intermediate haskell-level mindfuck starter kit. You can’t burn hundreds of millions doing actual work on a platform that everyone could start using solo in just a few days and deliver a working solution next week, even if raw and clumsy as it usually goes with non-pros.
I’d like to get a better and less bitter explanation, but there is none.