Comment by MikeTheGreat

tl;dr: Aside from whatever flaws the VB6 language had, people writing so-so code in VB6 contributed to it's reputation as being a bad language.

Something that my sibling comments haven't (yet) mentioned:

VB6 was really easy to create a GUI with, had great DB support, and was a pretty easy language to get started with. Given that a lot of business apps boil down to "present a nice, user-friendly interface to the company database" (particularly biz apps for smaller businesses) VB6 was a great fit for business consulting types. And use it they did! There were a lot of business consultant types writing code in VB6. They were smart people but not necessarily the most hard core coders.

I think that's part of why VB6 coders (as a group) got a reputation as being "lesser" programmers - they were derisively called "code monkeys", etc.

Regardless of the language itself, I think that seeing a lot of "minimally viable code" being shipped by people focused on delivering business apps helps to contribute to VB6's reputation.

Side question: I wonder how many people here on HN have a 'career origin story' something to the effect of "Yeah, so I was in college/high school/middle school, and the <name of small organization/mom-and-pop business> wanted to use their computer to streamline things. I was just learning how to code but was able to get VB to do <minimal but useful task> which really helped <org mentioned prior>. Looking back on it that was some really gnarly code I wrote, but it worked, <the org> appreciated it, and it got me hooked on programming"