Thankfully VB's "Unix philosophy" counterpart -- Tcl/Tk -- lives on. I have always found it faster to go from zero to GUI by laying it out declaratively in Tcl/Tk than by rat wrestling in VB -- and the results look better. With the Snit object system (part of the popular Tcllib), building components out of the basic widgets becomes a breeze.
The problem with VB and with other "business languages" going back to COBOL is that the skill ceiling is low. Not as low as this decade's no-code craze, but tools like that make the easy bits easier and the hard bits asymptotically approach impossible -- and as projects mature, hard bits dominate the lifecycle. Tcl has an absurdly high skill ceiling but it has problems of its own. You can do crazy Lisp-style metaprogramming, but the semantics are as if designed by a Lovecraftian madman who'd been exposed to dread Cthulhu.
So nothing is perfect but there are ways to feel as productive as VB, even today.
The problem with VB and with other "business languages" going back to COBOL is that the skill ceiling is low. Not as low as this decade's no-code craze, but tools like that make the easy bits easier and the hard bits asymptotically approach impossible -- and as projects mature, hard bits dominate the lifecycle. Tcl has an absurdly high skill ceiling but it has problems of its own. You can do crazy Lisp-style metaprogramming, but the semantics are as if designed by a Lovecraftian madman who'd been exposed to dread Cthulhu.
So nothing is perfect but there are ways to feel as productive as VB, even today.