>2) never wrote a common function, instead he used cut-and-paste, so the same code might reside several different places in the same form.
>3) managed to create a form that takes -seven minutes- to update four records in different tables.
>
>This was meant to be a mission critical app too, handling large financial transactions... Yow.

I've seen worse things done in Cobol, and it was supposed to be an easy-to-read-and-understand language. I've seen programmers copying whole apps just to rename the year they were valid for. Nothing can save work entrusted to a... what's English for German "Dumkopf"?

Now this may be a different question - what is a common behavior that a specific software tool develops at its user, i.e. programmer. Old versions of Basic (with line numbers and/or labels) forced you to write spaghetti GoToed code. OOP urges you to rethink your interface and save time by creating reusable thingies. I may sound too biased saying that VB creates C&P programmers (take it for click&point or cut&paste, whatever you prefer), and that's only an impression I got from talking with people who tried it. Besides, most of today's languages are broad enough so you can keep your style within them, and there's a possibility for existence of multiple styles even among the users of the same framework, so it's probably hard to say today. Still, your story seems to depict a VB programmer which is maybe not typical, but also not hard to find.