The Microsoft Empire Reboots
Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10.  Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it was amazing knowing that i could create an application simply by dragging and dropping some elements and writing some code. I never had to worry about things like gtk bindings and makefiles etc. The earlier version of visual studio started up in less then a second and I never experienced any lag. The killer feature was probably the combination of both an just-in-time interpretator and a full-blown compiler. I could simply click play and the app would run, if i need an exe, it would also export one. This feature put most modern "repl-based languages" and "test-driven development" to shame. A lot of people complain that vb 6 is not object-orientated enough, but remember, C is not object-orientated either, and it still tops the tiobe programming list. Windows is sorely in need of an Rapid application development framework. Although vb6 still installs on windows 7, a lot of its features are broken. I really miss having an IDE that doesnt get in your way, starts up quickly, and allows you to get things done fast. The argument that vb6 encourages bad programming practices etc. is not really that valid when the user is not an professional programmer. After all, would you rather teach your kids to code by teaching him about build tools and commandlines and gui bindings or would you simply give them an environment where they can create whatever they want in a fuss-free way? Now, lets just hope that microsoft isnt stupid enough to nerf asp.net web forms.......