Outlook at it's **very best** (a long time ago) was a total disaster. I refuse outright to use it.

I thought that might get a reaction. But, my opinion still stands. In the bad old days of 8086 through to at least 80386, you were much better off learning assembler. Once Windows became ubiquitous, things got more difficult, but by then, we **should** have had better languages available than C and it's derivatives. The few that were viable seem to have been killed off by the C people to protect their their pet little ecosystem (But that does sound a bit like a conspiracy theory)

C, in all it's variants (and that includes JAVA and RUST) is an abomination. It should never have survived as long as it has. It was only ever intended to be a 'bridging' language between the horror of Fortran and the "New" languages that were just around the corner.

BASIC. The only problem with any of the modern BASIC variants is the the name. It should have been changed years ago to something that sounds better. BASIC is the direction that programming languages should have been taking for decades. A programming language is a tool. A tool is something that makes work easier. C, Java and the like make simple jobs complicated, and complicated jobs - well, we won't go there. Unfortunately BASIC has been all but killed off because it scared the crap out of the C guys. VB was arguably one of Microsoft's biggest successes - suddenly anyone smarter than a manager or an accountant could write useful programs. They weren't always fast, or efficient, but they solved real world problems, then and there. And here lies one of the less understood issues with software - many, many programs are written as quick one offs to answer a question, or extract some data. They do not need the .NET framework or the latest C++ or Java support libs, or some horrendously expensive and complicated Studio Suite to create them BASIC was able to do this AND produce high quality complicated full fledged applications. And it still can. My favourite is PowerBasic - PowerBASIC[^] There are a few others. It seems to me that all the 'new' languages we see are based on C syntax. A whole bunch of cryptic punctuation marks interspersed with some unreadable, unintuitive bits of code. It's time to move on. C was never meant to last this long. It was an interim replacement to FORTRAN, until the 'new' languages came along. Sadly they never did.