Via John Lam from his post and I quote:

Jaroslaw Rzeszotko wrote a number of ‘great programmers’ to see if they could answer a number of questions about what it takes to become a great programmer. He then blogged the answers.

Linus, said this in his answer to the question: What do you think will be the next big thing in computer programming? X-oriented programming, y language, quantum computers, what?

For example, I personally believe that “Visual Basic” did more for programming than “Object-Oriented Languages” did. Yet people laugh at VB and say it’s a bad language, and they’ve been talking about OO languages for decades.

And no, Visual Basic wasn’t a great language, but I think the easy DB interfaces in VB were fundmantally more important than object orientation is, for example.

Read the rest of his answer to get the context.

Perhaps this will give a little more ammunition to the VB team to return VB to its roots :)

Many people I know pooh-pooh VB and they always do it comparatively...

• "Oh you know - WTF is a VB.NET Array ?"
• "It is such a childish language..."
• ...

... right ... as compared to ?

While I am definitely not the first to heap praise, I wont be so quick to critique it as well. I fully agree with Linus' comments. One must not forget its place in the computing world. It has done lots for computer programming and has gotten it to the mainstream. I use the same analogy for Windows 95/98. Many people pooh-pooh it, always on hindsight. Too many of us forget what it has done for the computer world in the late 90s and early 2000s. I doubt the propagation, adoption and the use of the Personal Computer or the Internet would be the way it is today without those platforms.

Crappy as it seems with comparison to today's tools and resources, I think the world would not be able to afford to laugh at it if it wasnt there in the first place.