I never saw Visual Basic versions 1 & 2. My first experience was with Version 3 and I have programmed in every version since.
While I was working for a large organisation in Sydney doing VB programming amongst other things, there was a large group of consultants brought in to write a new application. They all programmed in C++ and looked down on anyone who didn’t. After 18 months of continuous failures and massive cost overruns the consultants were thrown out and the project was converted to VB. Not surprisingly it was compeleted fairly quickly and worked reasonably well.
Does this mean that VB is better than C++? Absolutely not! And in this case the VB application was a time bomb waiting to explode. When I left the organisation some years later all our VB coding was done in VB6, but we still needed to maintain this one VB3 application. And the cost of conversion to VB6 was just to high.
But for the right application VB, in its various forms, is the right tool for the job. In my current life I work for myself writing applications for small to medium businesses. And most business applications are similar in this respect: you grab some data from a database and display it on the screen. You update, delete or insert new data. And for this, especially with reasonably small amounts of data running on a desktop, or a small number networked computers, VB is ideal.
While some may argue that it is not the best language around it does the job, it is quick to code, and there is a veritable army of VB coders out there so application maintenance is not a problem.