I ran a very successful company (successful for a time) that sold Visual Basic developer tools via a printed mail-order catalog named VBxtras.
Two things killed Visual Basic:
1. The web. Visual Basic was first and foremost a Windows desktop app development tool, and their UI-first model of app development did not translate well to the web, or at least the attempts to translate to the web did not resonate.
2. Microsoft. Rather than continue the simplicity Visual Basic offered, Microsoft "improved" it by releasing VB.NET which abandoned the core simplicity that made Visual Basic so wildly popular among "Occupational Programmers," as Kathleen Dollard[1] and I lamented back in the day. The upshot was that former Visual Basic programmers fell into two (2) camps; they either:
A.) Abandoned VB for something else, or nothing at all, because they did not want to have to become a professional programmer, OR
B.) Switched to C# because if they were going to learn how to be a "real" programmer they might as learn C# and not C#'s disfavored sibling VB.NET.
BTW, the company that has developed XMLUI was one of our better vendors of VBX components for Visual Basic. They have since renamed to /n software, but at first they were named IP*Works (I think I stylized that name correctly per how they did at the time.)
As a counterpoint, I have many times had to interact with the those technologies, and thus been able to use their source code as packages and/or learn their source code techniques which I have then used in my own Go programs.
What does that prove? it proves that no single developer's anecdotal evidence can be used to validate a broad-brushed claim like "The language they are written in is irrelevant."
Agree with your assumption, but then I also know that developers often read recommendations and convert them into dogma, ignoring the specifics for when those recommendations should be applied.
Early in my career I taught programmers and I was horrified to come back to one client and find they followed my advice, but not where it applied meaning that what they did was actively harmful.
Ever since that, I realized when a developer makes a recommendation they need to be very explicit about when it applies otherwise they are doing more harm than good and hopefully someone will publicly challenge their recommendation to bring their unstated qualifications to light.
Deno 2.0 explicitly copied Go in many features, especially with dependencies being referenced via URL, and many of the CLI's commands are inspired by Go such as install, fmt, and test.
I recognized exactly that way back in 1995. I used to teach Clipper in the late 80s and early 90s and you could do so much with it. It's competitor was FoxPro, which was far less capable.
However, in hindsight after I quit using it I realized that Clipper developers often focused on perfecting code — myself included — whereas FoxPro developers just got shit done for the client/end-user. #fwiw
In all your comments you seem to be hitting the nail on the head.
Someone can say the German language is a bad language. But it is not the language that is bad, it is the person's perception.
When they try to evaluate German while thinking in English it is no surprise they consider it sub-standard. Germans, OTOH, are much better equipped to evaluate the German language than those who only know how to think in English.
(Full disclosure; my grandfather was German but I only know how to think in English.)
As a counterpoint, Go is currently the only language I do not find revolting.
And complaining about "thing string" vs. "string thing" seems high on pedantry.
Yes, there are aspects of Go I really dislike, but I find fewer things to dislike in Go compared to things I dislike in all the other languages I have programmed in.
Two things killed Visual Basic:
1. The web. Visual Basic was first and foremost a Windows desktop app development tool, and their UI-first model of app development did not translate well to the web, or at least the attempts to translate to the web did not resonate.
2. Microsoft. Rather than continue the simplicity Visual Basic offered, Microsoft "improved" it by releasing VB.NET which abandoned the core simplicity that made Visual Basic so wildly popular among "Occupational Programmers," as Kathleen Dollard[1] and I lamented back in the day. The upshot was that former Visual Basic programmers fell into two (2) camps; they either:
A.) Abandoned VB for something else, or nothing at all, because they did not want to have to become a professional programmer, OR
B.) Switched to C# because if they were going to learn how to be a "real" programmer they might as learn C# and not C#'s disfavored sibling VB.NET.
I blogged about occupational programmers several times back then: https://mikeschinkel.com/tags/occupationalprogrammers/
BTW, the company that has developed XMLUI was one of our better vendors of VBX components for Visual Basic. They have since renamed to /n software, but at first they were named IP*Works (I think I stylized that name correctly per how they did at the time.)
[1] Ironically Kathleen is now leads the .NET Core CLI at Microsoft, and is also lead over VB, I think: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/author/kathleen-a-doll...)