Note that this question is not meant to start an argument, I am genuinely curious:

Back in the 90s I used to work for a large CPU maker and we were building some debuggers. All our core logic was in C++, but the GUI was made in VB6. We couldn't figure out MFC and it was too much a hassle. We glued together VB6 and C++ using COM which we created via ATL.

Fast forward to 2009, having been mostly in the Java world I am looking at job boards and seeing more VB6 jobs than I expected. I genuinely thought that VB6 was extinct, especially since VB.NET supposedly solved a lot of the problems with the VB6 which at the time felt a lot like a scripting language than a true OOP language.

So what happened? Why is new code still written in it? Isn't there a better way to glue C++ and VB.NET?

Note that I haven't used VB.NET, I just understand that it is a much more "stricter" language than VB6 was. Even with Option Explicit or whatever it was.