Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

Two things initially drew me to VB. Being able to draw the GUI was certainly a very cool and empowering thing. I could make software that "looked like software" by the standards of the day, with minimal effort.

The other was that the alternative to VB for GUI creation was wrestling with class libraries, at a point when OOP was utterly baffling to many casual programmers like myself. Just the bare minimum "hello world" kind of app on either Windows or a Mac was page after page of instructions.

I suspect that over the span of subsequent decades, demands on high quality GUIs have increased -- as mentioned by others. But also, the programming skills needed to build a small GUI using code have become more mainstream, maybe because the languages have gradually made it easier.

Today, for the quality of GUIs that I need, I'm actually happier to just code them, and let (in my case) Tkinter lay them out in an acceptable default arrangement. My victims, er, users haven't asked for anything better.

Ditto with Motif under Unix, a Hello World was crazily verbose (even more with Xaw), while something in TCL/Tk was about two or three brief lines.

One of the reasons I hardly bothered with Motif back on its heyday, was that it was much worse than Win32.