You can’t look at the language in isolation. Visual Basic was backed by the fantastic Visual Studio for development. That ecosystem was way more mature than Java ever got with Swing et al. IMO, if there’s one thing MS ever did right, it was how they nailed WYSIWYG GUI app development. Now they’re going backwards with the WinUI XAML crap.
The experience has become worse with WinUI 3. They got rid of the designer view. So now you're developing the UX code first. This is very unlike the prior paradigm, where you would typically drag and drop the components in your workspace/design view and then code the interactions. It is precisely what made Windows programming so accessible to the millions of developers. This is a step in the wrong direction IMO.
