Comment by hnlmorg

> Even Visual Basic, a real platform that evolved over many years and gained “serious language features”, has fallen out of fashion

VB didn't fall out of fashion. Microsoft unceremoniously killed it and replaced it with VB.NET - a language nobody asked for. VB.NET has the verbosity of C# but with none of the benefits.

These days there's little incentive to learn VB because it's been dead for quarter of a century. And there's little point reviving it because anyone who wants a GUI will likely be working with web frameworks.

I did like VB, a lot. It was such a shame to see the abomination MS released with VB.NET. And that makes me all the more grateful that most languages these days are open. For example Perl 6 (now Raku) ended up taking a journey that fragmented the ecosystem, so dedicated and passionate Perl developers took on the mantel to continue the life of Perl 5