> No function definitions, no classes, no callbacks.

But VB had all those things.

There was a time when VB came in two flavors. I believe VB5 was this way: The regular version that most of us bought allowed us to use classes, but not to create them. I know for myself, this enabled me to ease my way into OOP, because I could experience the benefits without any of the major pitfalls. If you wanted to create classes, you had to buy or download an extra package, that I never bothered with. I was basically a procedural programmer who could use classes supplied to me by somebody else.

Turning VB into a full blown professional development language akin to C# was, in my view, a mistake. It kind of erased the reason for "the rest of us" to use Basic. I switched to Python instead.