Have you ever cursed VB? Alan Cooper, the “Father of Visual Basic”, offers his apology here. In fact he is not be blamed for Visual Basic, the language. What he created was the visual designer part, which was later bought by Microsoft. This tool was originally called “Tripod”. It pioneered the idea of the software IDE with widgets palette and drag-and-drop form design facilities. It also came with a small language for command execution. Each command and widget (or gizmos, as Cooper called them) was implemented as a dll, thus making Tripod user-extensible. These ideas revolutionized the programming tools landscape. Remember the RAD fad of the ‘nineties? Microsoft renamed Tripod as “Ruby” (!!) and later, replaced the command language with Basic, though Alan Cooper disliked it. Ruby became Visual Basic. You can read the whole story here.

BTW, if you are interested in product/UI design, you may want to look at the works of his company.