Mayayana
| I know a programmer who< horror of horrors, makes a | decent living using Visual Basic. |

I've actually been using VB6 since '99. Ironically, along with VC6, it's probably the most widely supported, and one of the most suitable, current tools for Windows "desktop" programming. The runtime has been pre-installed since Win2000, and it's only about 1.3 MB. So VB6 runs nearly everywhere without any extra requirements. Of course, it's no good for WinPhone or RT tablet software. But nothing really does both. The tool that came after VB was .Net, which was never meant for writing Windows software -- it was designed for web services -- and the current runtime is something like 1/2 GB. The "latest and greatest", the WinRT runtime, can't produce Windows desktop software at all. It's only for writing AJAX-style apps to run on the Metro Tile UI. (One *can* use .Net to write Windpows software or Metro software, but in the former case it's poorly suited and in the latter case it's superfluous.)

So, so much for newer being better by definition.