Edsger W. Dijkstra famously had this to say about BASIC: Visual Basic happened a few years after QBasic, which succeeded to BASIC.
It was a gateway language back then too: “real programmers” wrote C++.
I happened to be in college around these years, and Programming I involved VB6. These were the golden years of Visual Basic: everyone knew VB.
For a number of years Microsoft was selling a VBA Software Development Kit (SDK), and with it you could embed VBA in your own product to enable scripting against your own COM API / object model library: you could write an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, CAD software, vector graphics drawing software, anything really – and enable user extensibility through the VBA SDK. VBA is a version of “classic” Visual Basic (VB5, VB6) that is hosted in another application. Obscure code with weird variable names, twisted code that’s hard to read and ever harder to follow, can be written in every single programming language yet invented or not. And nothing in VBA says it can’t be exactly that. Code that’s well organized, that uses small specialized and reusable components that can be tested independently, …is just objectively better code. Code is written to be executed, right? What if we wrote code for it to be read instead? Code that’s easy to understand, is easier to maintain and to extend without breaking things. VBA is a gateway language – it was for me, anyway. It gets things done, and abstracts away boilerplate that you don’t really need to worry about in order to, well, get things done. For some reason this year VB6 and VB.NET aren’t making the list, but VBA is sitting at the very top of it, with 75.2% of respondents “dreading” VBA. The annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey has always ranked VBA pretty high on the “most dreaded” languages.
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