The true successors to VB today are low code tools like Retool. Visually create an internal app for your business, then use a (relatively) simple language (this time JavaScript) to make it do basic CRUD stuff.

For various reasons, we kind of lost that pragmatic approach when apps moved from the desktop to the web browser, and we've only just recently started to revisit it.

Tcl/Tk has entered the chat.

Some of us don't want to spend an hour rat wrestling to get a form up -- a form that won't even tolerate resizing very well. Tcl/Tk is pretty much the fastest way to go from zero to functional GUI I've ever seen -- especially if you already have some functionality that works from the command line and just need to wrap it. It's also available from Python as Tkinterm and is amenable to repl driven development.

I've written both Tcl/Tk code and Lazarus and i think the latter is much faster to make things: not only you have a visual WYSIAWYG[0] editor but also a very rich framework.

[0] A for Almost as technically the program can compile with different GUI backends (Win32, Gtk, Qt, etc) :-P

Still not as accessible to non-techies as VB was, but I've been really enjoying using the Godot game engine for making simple GUI apps.

I'd like to know more about that. If you've a blog or something.

What are the reasons for using this vs a simple UI library like tkinter?

Free Pascal/Lazarus is pretty close, but the documentation needs work. It's my go to for Windows GUI development.

Yea, VB was quite something. I look back at it with fond reminiscence.