I was expecting to see the most productive IDEs of all time, Visual Basic 6 and/or Borland Delphi, but we're just ahead of those in this article.

While it was truly amazing that Borland managed to stuff a full text editor into a TSR under MS-DOS, and every new version of Turbo Pascal was faster and had more features, it all culminated somewhere around Delphi for me, and Visual Basic 6 for almost everyone else.

Then the world ended... Anders Hejlsberg was lost to Microsoft, and everyone went collectively crazy in at least two orthogonal ways.

First there was the obsession with C++ as "higher level" than Pascal and the view that it was for "adults", which was delusional. C++ generated a f*ckton more boilerplate and was brittle for the same functionality, at least when generating a GUI program.

Then there was Microsoft's obsession with .NET, which they never recovered from. They crammed all the bloat of an interpreter into everything imaginable, even the operating system. You were always having to get the latest .NET libraries to make things work. They destroyed Visual Basic over this, and it never recovered.

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