HN has this weird nostalgic thing for VB and Delphi, but I feel that most people who express it either haven't actually used these tools or don't remember it well. There's no way to do responsive interfaces with it. If you want anything but your OSes native controls, you're in the world of hell too. Even localisation is a problem. No unit, no integration tests. WYSIWYG editors mean that form files are changed automatically and it's often not realistic to review the diffs. And the languages itself — while being adequate for their time, they're don't even have support for functions as first-class objects, so compared to modern alternatives they're almost unusable and require enormous amount of boilerplate.
Oh sweet summer child. (if you are going to call us weirdly nostalgic)
There were ton's of methods - from extremely manual code-based detection of window resizing events, then subsequent calculating and scaling contained controls, to a myriad of third-party libraries/components that would provide an automatic resizable host container for other controls.
Localization was not a problem - VB6 supported 'resource files' like every other Win32 app. Unit and integration tests were possible - but uglier with visual forms - typically requiring third-party products, and/or low-level Win32-API integrations. But in reality - you would abstract all of your business logic into classes/modules/units with very little within the UI, so that those would be unit-tested, instead of the UI.
Now - don't get me wrong, VB was limited in many many ways, and I am not nostalgic for it - but, it was more capable than the picture you are painting. Delphi even moreso, as it had easy and direct access to the entire Win32 API and could handle threading and pointers as well.
