We don't use Visual Basic.
VB drawbacks include the inability to do much without custom controls and a non-portable method of handling the OS; e.g. knowledge of something as trivial as using a custom cursor or handling a windows message in a program coded with a Pascal or C++ compiler is useless because VB doesn't allow it. Rather, you need to figure out a way to make VB do this, and this knowledge is unique to VB. Therefore you can't transport your knowledge to any other language.
In addition, the code isn't transportable either. C programmers can write loan calculator code (for example) in windows and take the core of this code and re-use it years later in a UNIX environment. Even script code such as javascript is reusable. For example the loan calculator code in javascript on this site was easily ported from older C examples. Our basic curve fit routines (on this site) are also portable to Windows or UNIX or even embedded systems as required. Portability and reusability of knowledge and code are paramount to the long term viability of any programmer or company. This is how we keep costs down.
Furthermore, VB is limited to a certain class of projects: you can't write an installer with it, create a winsock, write a driver, make a standard DLL, etc. As we see it any language worthy of investing time in should be capable of any project we want to work on and code excerpts should be viable in any environment.
If this wasn't enough, there are a number of drawbacks to any resulting program: the size of the required runtime is 4+ Megs, installation and maintenance of the myriad DLLs and OCX packages invites corruption, and finally, the execution speed of VB programs is unacceptably slow. In conjunction with the above code development issues this results in a project that takes longer to work on to achieve the same objectives -- and the result is prone to instability. It isn't any accident that of the software titles available at your favorite computer store, the vast majority of these are NOT coded in VB. (And we ought to know; we've written plenty of retail titles.)
The bottom line? VB code and knowledge isn't reusable, the resulting executable is prone to instability, and this is not acceptable.
