Visual Basic 6 was innovative for its time - garbage collection, limited dynamic typing, foreach-style iteration. It compiled to bytecode and ran reasonably efficiently.
VBA works very well for its intended purpose, which is creating simple macros for Word and Excel. The idea of systematically ensuring that there was a 1:1 match between what you could do by hand and what you could automate with VBA rather than only exposing a limited subset of the program to an extension language is a pretty good one, and a substantial part of the reason there's no way in hell a hardcore Excel user would switch over to any of the web-based spreadsheet gadgets out there.
But, yes, programming in pre-.NET Visual Basic (which is really just C# with Basic-style syntax) is pretty infuriating, because the hard stuff is not hard, it's impossible.
I think the measure of "VBness" of a language may not be so much the intrinsic qualities of a language as the calibre of the programmers it attracts. I think VB was (is? ) considered an atrocious language because the average user of VB was, rightly or wrongly, seen to be a "mord" who knew next to nothing of programming and wanted to drag and drop and click his way to project success.
I think CakePHP is the new VB since you can easily install VB6 on any Windows computer and make apps for (at the time) 95% of computers (and for Parallels now as well), just like PHP apps run on almost any existing web host. Also like VB6, CakePHP apps are based on a very simple language (BASIC versus PHP) while Ruby is different in some ways than languages most programmers are familiar with. Finally, CakePHP and VB6 both evolved from very popular languages used by hundreds of thousands of people for many years (BASIC, QBASIC, regular PHP), while almost nobody used Ruby before Ruby on Rails came along.
Finally, on all three points, I'm comparing and contrasting Ruby on Rails. Ruby itself is nowhere near Visual Basic--QBasic might be a better comparison.
in short no, the thing that made vb popular was it RAD stuff. Ruby on its own does not have windowing etc. Then again maybe it is when you look at the uptake of it. I still think people miss the point of vb and get far to elitist about whatever their fav language. why would I write a 5000 line C program when I could do it in a 1000 a lot quicker? If the end result is the same nothing is lost by doing it in vb. I live by use the best tool for the job.
Whilst no IDE style tooling, rails is kind of a "RAD" (non visual) tool for classic style web apps. What with all the scaffolding and only writing the minimal code to deal with actions etc.
So perhaps rails is the new VB would be more fair.
I've been writing Rails apps for a while. While I still use scaffolding, I almost always start changing them after I generate it it. A lot of the better Rails dev on #rubyonrails write their stuff from scratch. People who want to take scaffolding to something more capable usually use a plugin such as ActiveScaffold.
If you want to point to anything "RAD" in Rails, it is the ActiveRecord ORM, and more recently, the RESTful controllers.
Hanging out on #rubyonrails, there are a lot of Rails newcomers who come into the channel with little or no programming background, or those that do, come in without having first learned Ruby. They expect to be able to have Rails do the work for them, but Rails doesn't replace the need for a programmer to be able to think. Even a highly expressive language will have difficulty helping someone who has nothing to express.
sounds a bit similar to VB - although of course it was (deliberately) a far less capable language, it still had the same issue of people expecting just to sprinkle a "little code" behind the scenes and have it work.
My (distant) memory of most RAD tools of the 90s was similar to scaffolding - in some cases it could get you started but for any reasonable app, you tended to build stuff up by hand or dynamically etc.
I still think it bears a lot of similarity. Now with Sun and MS "blessing" ruby as a glue language, it seems even more likely to follow a similar path, for better and worse.
I'm fully anticipating the day when an entire generation of non-US kids who grew up with the OLPC XO, and expect Python and Squeak to be in "grown up" computers.
Ruby is like a Japanese stone garden or a bonsai tree. Maybe it'll stay weird and Japanese enough to keep the tourists from stumbling in drunk, late at night.
to me Ruby is what Sun always wanted - a simple language (ideally running on the Java VM) that would lure away all those disgruntled VB programmers away from MS... too bad they focused their initial attention on Groovy. Times have changed
