I think VB dead just because RAD is dead just like the article states: Careless newbies, bored company workers, and summer students trampled in, solving challenges that would have been much more difficult on any other platform, and spraying spaghetti code everywhere. In other words, because VB was easy enough to use even if you weren’t a trained coder, it was used by plenty of people who weren’t trained coders. And VB did nothing to encourage them to correct their bad habits.