Quote Originally Posted by SearchingDataOnly View Post
Understand. I would say that a good IDE can compensate for a lot of the shortcomings of a programming language. Office-Script (TypeScript) is amazing, but it doesn't have a great visual IDE like VB6 or VB.NET.

In addition, Basic-style programming languages are easier to take advantage of the power of IDEs than C-style programming languages.
This also touches on something to connect with the point I was making about earlier about modern coding paradigms.

One of the things I've noticed is that us in the VB6 and earlier .Net communities are pretty unique in our love for drag and drop designers. But outside of our little bubble, the standard is to have UI logic and backend logic completely separate and only meet through well defined connection points. This is where the modern design patterns I was talking about earlier comes into play. These patterns help in designing very elegant ways of joining separate systems while providing maximum flexibility.

Drag and drop designers like what we have in VB6 and .Net's WinForms don't really mesh well with this modern way of designing programs. These designers encourage you to mix UI code with other types of program logic so when a client comes along and tells you he wants the program to have a UI on Linux and you have to use a UI framework like say, GTK+, you're in trouble. Now you have to untangle the non-UI bits from the UI bits.

Now this isn't to say that what we have is bad or wrong. It's well suited for us as a lot of us are more or less confined to Windows-based UI development work but this won't work well for full-stack development where you can have multiple technologies that are fundamentally incompatible with each other working together. For example, you might have Python-based backend that powers an HTML frontend for the Web users and an Android frontend for mobile users. You might also expose an HTTP REST-based API written in something like C# and so on. Drag/Drop designers just don't have much of a role in this environment.