> I can see that the tooling might've been great and all, but the language is seriously just horrible.

The language wasn't that bad. Classes without inheritance -- that's the new hotness these days!

Since you lumped in VB.NET in there you're definitely past the prime era and oddly I agree that VB.NET is horrible while I still think VB, for the time, was perfectly reasonable. It certainly has less gotchas than JavaScript.

Admittedly most of my experience was in VB.NET, with a small caveat. The codebase I worked on (for around 3 years) was initially ported verbatim from an old VB6 + Access app, and it had the bare minimum amount of changes needed to make it work, so I feel like (and wrote the comment with the assumption that) at least the business logic part of said software was more VB6 than it was VB.NET. Barely no classes and 0 inheritance (the one good side), but also really dodgy imperative code with laughably brittle error handling (when it was there at all), wonky syntax (subjective), and an extremely loose approach with typing.

Considering that I spent (and still do spend) most of my afternoons with Haskell and F#, it was a bit of a shock and an experience that I don't remember fondly at all heh

Classic VB comes from an entirely different era. It's hard to express how bad programming languages/environments were in general at that time. From that perspective VB is pretty decent. But we're sorta blessed these days that there really aren't any terrible programming languages anymore. Although we're also cursed that an environment like VB for building applications isn't really possible anymore.

One thing I would correct is that VB does not have extremely loose typing. VB is strongly typed with one exception: the variant type that could hold any other type (kinda like "object" in Java/C# but implemented like a union).

And don't forget the lost battle that is to try to keep a clean git history in VB6 with words changing the leading letter from uppercase to lowercase and viceversa or all the form properties jumping around whenever you touch the preview of the GUI (ie. Switching to a different tab).

Adding all the words to the top of each file[0] and saving every file resolved it for me. Just need to pay attention to not change the casing when modifing/adding code.

[0] https://github.com/Soldat/polyworks/blob/37aaf471646fe4773e6...