The untrained masses have a way into getting hooked on tools that are harder but offer no benefit compared to many other stuff available around. It is very easy to hate those tools.
Having been a teacher's assistant on courses the answer is very clearly and emphatically: Yes.
It's easy to discount the accessibility of a syntax when you are already at the top of the learning curve, but the Algol family will always be tougher to teach/learn than the BASIC family. Punctuation is harder than you think. (Aside: partly why I think JavaScript is actually the easiest to teach in the Algol-inspired family for the benefit of having optional semicolons alone.)
«Or that any of those is less accessible than VB6?»
That's not an anecdote I have first hand experience with. I think there are a lot of cranky VB6 developers that sneer that VB.NET is worse and so much harder than VB6, but my gut tells me that that may be more the relative learning curve/gap in moving from VB6 to VB14. I don't think it is anywhere near as representative of the accessibility of learning VB14 as a first language. (I also think the more important question is the accessibility of moving from Office VBA to VB14, as it still seems for a lot of disciplines Office VBA is the most important first step towards programming.)
«The untrained masses have a way into getting hooked on tools that are harder but offer no benefit compared to many other stuff available around.»
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. I don't think VB.NET is any "harder" than C# and while VB.NET might not offer "more benefit" than C# (assuming you discount syntax/accessibility entirely as a benefit), it certainly is no worse than C# as a tool for a person to use.
As I remember it, there were lots of angry VB6 developers when Microsoft discontinued the "old" VB and told them to migrate to VB.Net. I vaguely remember there was some kind of online petition (although it was a long time ago, my memory might be playing tricks on me).
[0] https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...
VBA 6 is exactly the same language as VB 6, with the same IDE. VBA 7 (the current version) adds some new types to support 64-bit mode.
(I'm currently maintaining a bunch of VBA code in a third-party application that uses it for scripting.)
It was not clear by the comment, but I was not talking about VB.Net. This one is no worse than C# or Java, and I also don't see many people stuck on it.
That phrase applies much more to VB6 (even more in the day), and some others like PHP, or, going out of the generic domain MathLab (that used to suck, a lot, but doesn't anymore), and VBA.
It wasn't quite "open the site in the new IDE and fix all the squiggly underlined bits" but that was a substantial part of the mechanical effort.
Starting from nothing? Skip VB.Net and start with C# (assuming you're set on the CLR). Starting from VB6 and a novice programmer? VB.Net has advantages over C#, IMO.
It is by the way an act of cruelty from Microsoft to only provide office users with a 20 year old language that hasn't been updated since the end of the 90s... What happened to VSTA??
Office has support for multiple languages, not just VBA. The three that spring to mind are JavaScript, M and DAX.
http://stackoverflow.com/a/40727011
Also, if you don't mind using 3rd party solutions, you've got other options:
The side perk that I can relatively easily convert to C# later if I have to is there. But yeah, as much as I've worked in C style languages before, I find VB much more comfortable.