3.5 Million Developers. Then Microsoft Pulled the Plug.

Visual Basic, created by Alan Cooper's drag-and-drop interface technology and Microsoft's Basic language engine, democratized programming by enabling ordinary people to build Windows applications without complex coding, achieving 3.5 million developers and powering two-thirds of Windows business software; however, Microsoft deliberately killed it in 2002 as collateral damage in its war against Java, forcing developers to rewrite their code for the incompatible VB.NET platform, thereby destroying the largest programming community in history and killing the dream of accessible programming for the masses.