What if there was a NEW vb6

[Schmidt]

...Clean code looks similar in all languages, and follows similar practices.
That we're still bickering over this some 10 years later is what the "problem" with VB is to me: the community.

"Truer words were never spoken" - and all that...

This is a good thing, though! Accessible languages mean more people get their problems solved.
The novices are the problem, but they don't know better. How do we elevate them to write better code?

You mean, other than pulling your hair out?

Not sure, how "active" you were inside the VB-community to accomplish just that...
From my point of view the results are surely not what one likes them to be - but other than:
"keep trying", there's not much one can do (all in hope that some stuff "keeps sticking").

The problem is IMO not really solvable - because a high(er) "learning-curve-climbing-speed"
will be seen only, when the Novices do their programming "all day long" (8 hours per day) -
though that's not a given because (most) of the remaining VB-Community-Members are
Hobbyists with a completely different day-to-day-job - or self-taught + self-employed.

Members of that latter group sometimes *do* program all day long, so that's at least
something to saddle on - but many of them never really learned the "general basics"
(having studied entirely different things at a younger age, which had nothing to do with
software-development, algorithms, patterns, general design and testing).

The "VB-pyramid" (with regards to "achieved learning-curve-altitudes") is overproportionally
broad at the base - with a decent middle - and an very narrow Top.

That "pyramid" is much more "linear at the edges" with communities around different
languages, which have a higher "entry-hurdle".

The overall-impression in News-Forums for VB a 10-15 years ago, was somewhat better,
because - albeit the pyramid had roughly the same shape - the amount of "Top-Coders"
was (in absolute numbers) much higher, and thus the number of postings in a good quality
at top-level was too (there were more C++ guys, who used VC6 for the "heavy lifting" -
and VB6 to glue it all together in a GUI).

Olaf