Visual Basic earned large numbers of people large amounts of money and allowed them to make exactly what they wanted. Specifically, what they wanted was a solution, quickly that they could cobble together themselves without having to hire some person that would tell them all the time how what they wanted was not possible.
Ah, I hadn't meant to denigrate Visual Basic, though I can see how my comment could be taken that way.
My reference to Visual Basic rather comes from a large number of projects I saw that equated the GUI with the functionality. For example, I played with am "80% complete" program to translate between English and Latin texts. The New, Open, Save, and Exit buttons were all working. As soon as someone wrote the method for the Translate button, the program would be complete.
Visual Basic and 3D printing have both given thousands of people the opportunity to do things quickly and independently that they'd have never had the opportunity to try before. However, they've both also suffered the hype of those who assumed that their understanding of the surface was an understanding of the whole.
