alt Hacker News25 years ago well over 95% of users would have been on windows, and there is no chance in hell you'll ever convince me that modern web development is as easy as Visual Basic was for whipping up UIs back in the day.
That AI is making it easier is happenstance, it makes generating UIs in anything easier.
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Yesish… VB is easier for spinning up an interface but it also offers less creative flexibility than the current web platform.
The other side of that coin is training. You can train people on VB in far less time. Most people writing JavaScript for a living have absolutely no idea what they are doing. Most of these people are completely reliable on React to put text on screen and then other languages at absolutely every opportunity. While there is amazing stuff coming out of a select few start ups and many open source projects, those people are not the typical corporate software developer.
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Visual Basic had a massive advantage in that the window would always be the same size, or at least the same aspect ratio.
You just placed controls at absolute coordinates and they worked. When you ran the program it always looked exactly the same as in the editor. Later Windowses could scale it up by a constant factor for high-DPI displays.
In hindsight it's an excellent use of the KISS principle. We didn't need layout managers. Yes the window couldn't be maximised, but so be it, this was fine for many windows. If you did want that then you had to recalculate the widget positions yourself.
Exemplary of this style, I think, is the Windows 95-98 display settings window. The one every kid discovered because it was quickly accessible by right clicking the desktop and selecting "properties".