Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

At the time I think delphi did that concept in a better way, and I definitely switched from VB to Delphi as soon as I learned about it. Delphi still exists to this day.

There are also many low code platforms which have a VB-like UI builder, like mendix, or outsystems or microsoft’s power platform, but they tend to be a bit too enterprisey where VB was really the people’s champion.

I think canvas apps in power platform give much of the “feel” of dragging and dropping visual basic forms and let you build actually useful stuff, while targeting web and mobile. The downside of power platform is that as soon as you try to do anything serious with it you need the premium stuff and end up paying a lot. That makes it less suited to take up the niche that VB and Access had, because that niche mostly can’t afford power platform. Contrast that with scratch which is free to use and has a large community of “regular people” sharing cool stuff. Intuitively it seems that Microsoft should make power platform entirely free and use it as a lure for azure paid services, but then it is easy for me to spend their money.

By the way, I still don’t understand how power apps on iOS are according to apple’s guidelines, because you can use it to ship mobile apps to iOS users while entirely bypassing apple.

It's working on full backwards compatibility with VB6 (and very, very close to it, even many complex UserControls work), with a lengthy list of new features (x64-- through compat. with VBA7 x64 syntax, multithreading (via API for now, native syntax soon), generics, overloading, Unicode-everything, defining interfaces/coclasses in language instead of TLBs, easily makes standard DLLs, Implements-Via syntax to extend classes, parameterized class constructors, can specify UDT packing, bitshift operators, inline initialization of vars, forms support modern image formats/transparency/alpha blending, AddressOf works on class members... well, the list goes on for quite some time: https://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?890181-TwinBasic&p=5...

One thing I'm sure lots of people here will find blasphemous, it lets you make kernel mode drivers, provided you stick to WDM (you could do this as a hack in VB6, but you had to strip the runtime dependency out-- which dramatically limited usefulness, not to mention no WOW64 for kernel mode. tB has no runtime dependency so all you have to do is avoid strings/variants/most but not all arrays, as those call user mode APIs behind the scenes). Proof of concept: https://github.com/fafalone/HelloWorldDriver

Main downsides are that it's also like VB6 in being closed source/commercial (only restriction on the free version is a splash screen on x64 exes though, and won't have access to compiler optimizations or cross-platform compilation when they're implemented; no restriction on commercial use or royalties), but the creator seems amenable to changing that if it's viable, and since we've had 20 years of no community stepping up for something like this, it's just a practical matter that for one person to do it they'd need income as it's a major undertaking, not something you can do as a hobby with full time employment doing something else, at least if it's going to get done in years instead of decades (*cough* Radbasic, which has made near zero progress after being announced around the same time, and is barely a step above Hello World support).