I ran a very successful company (successful for a time) that sold Visual Basic developer tools via a printed mail-order catalog named VBxtras.
Two things killed Visual Basic:
1. The web. Visual Basic was first and foremost a Windows desktop app development tool, and their UI-first model of app development did not translate well to the web, or at least the attempts to translate to the web did not resonate.
2. Microsoft. Rather than continue the simplicity Visual Basic offered, Microsoft "improved" it by releasing VB.NET which abandoned the core simplicity that made Visual Basic so wildly popular among "Occupational Programmers," as Kathleen Dollard[1] and I lamented back in the day. The upshot was that former Visual Basic programmers fell into two (2) camps; they either:
A.) Abandoned VB for something else, or nothing at all, because they did not want to have to become a professional programmer, OR
B.) Switched to C# because if they were going to learn how to be a "real" programmer they might as learn C# and not C#'s disfavored sibling VB.NET.
BTW, the company that has developed XMLUI was one of our better vendors of VBX components for Visual Basic. They have since renamed to /n software, but at first they were named IP*Works (I think I stylized that name correctly per how they did at the time.)
Two things killed Visual Basic:
1. The web. Visual Basic was first and foremost a Windows desktop app development tool, and their UI-first model of app development did not translate well to the web, or at least the attempts to translate to the web did not resonate.
2. Microsoft. Rather than continue the simplicity Visual Basic offered, Microsoft "improved" it by releasing VB.NET which abandoned the core simplicity that made Visual Basic so wildly popular among "Occupational Programmers," as Kathleen Dollard[1] and I lamented back in the day. The upshot was that former Visual Basic programmers fell into two (2) camps; they either:
A.) Abandoned VB for something else, or nothing at all, because they did not want to have to become a professional programmer, OR
B.) Switched to C# because if they were going to learn how to be a "real" programmer they might as learn C# and not C#'s disfavored sibling VB.NET.
I blogged about occupational programmers several times back then: https://mikeschinkel.com/tags/occupationalprogrammers/
BTW, the company that has developed XMLUI was one of our better vendors of VBX components for Visual Basic. They have since renamed to /n software, but at first they were named IP*Works (I think I stylized that name correctly per how they did at the time.)
[1] Ironically Kathleen is now leads the .NET Core CLI at Microsoft, and is also lead over VB, I think: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/author/kathleen-a-doll...)