I’d like to learn how the rising complexity of tooling allows for text messaging, compliance, self-service or mailing(?). Right now this idea doesn’t sound particularly reasonable to me.
You can run a web server for self service, use a job queue on that same server to schedule actions sent to api providers for sms (Twilio) and letter mail (postgrid), integrate with insurers that provide an api if you don’t want to send papermail. All on a single machine, or virtual machine running JS, and serving JS and HTML.
Compliance is a matter of ensuring that you are following correct practices, and possible audits.
In exchange you get a program that can run on any of billions of devices in seconds without having to worry about local deployment.
If all you want is something like VB, you can opt for some of the low-code/no-code options mentioned elsewhere that are built on top of web technology.
I’m not saying that for what VB was used for, it isn’t a better solution. I’m saying that we ask our computers to do a lot more than we did 25 years ago, and tools like VB can’t do as much as the easier to write languages that have emerged in that time.
