I hesitate to believe Python would exist in the way it does today if Microsoft hadn't treated VB so badly. It's only now being replaced as the default to teach in schools because of its simplicity and readability.
I spent a long time working in a codebase that was half C# and half VB.NET, and after a couple years I could switch between the two without thinking. VB has slightly more verbose syntax but that's about it, they're pretty interchangeable.
I don't hate `Dim foo As Boolean = True` but I wouldn't say it's more simple and readable than `bool foo = true;`.
I'm not saying VB is the best language, just that it's the one I find the fastest and most comfortable for me to work in.
Honestly, because of how much VisualStudio auto-completes code, the biggest practical difference that cause me grief was semi-colons: spend a day working in one language, and spend the next day constantly getting the other language wrong.
I remember back in maybe C#5 days there were somethings that I thought VB was nicer for (though I can't remember or find what they were now), but spending the last years working with modern versions (C#7.3 or C#8) there's nothing at all I miss from VB.
The 2007 project was a mess when I inherited it - the contractors who wrote it were based in India, and the code looked like a VB6 project. They had not turned on option explicit or option strict. They did not understand how events or event handlers worked - they added handles clauses to methods then assigned a variable with the current instance to make the events happen. It was bizarre. They also did a lot of horribly hacky things because all the variables were basically being treated as variant. There was even a bit of code where they had a select case statement where a Boolean variable was being used as a case... and I mean it was doing a select case on and integer, and one of the cases was a Boolean variable. So it depended on what that was set to as to what the case did. I turned on option strict and explicit, took a deep breath, and fixed the hundreds of errors. It was BRUTAL! I'm not saying this is something that is an issue with VB, that was down to the programmers not being trained properly and making some very bad decisions. But in C# it would have been very hard to make the same mistakes.
By the time I left the 2013 job in 2018, I had divorced myself from almost all of the VB.Net code and I swore I would never touch VB again. So far, so good.
As there was never (as far as I know) an easy way to migrate existing apps from VB6 to VB.NET, the main reason to use VB.NET would have been a preference for the BASIC syntax, which I don't think was ever particularly common, this was always just a loud minority. And a significant part of this minority also didn't like VB.NET because even this was too different from what they were used to.
Keep in mind the only 2 good GUI tools at the time, IIRC, were VB6 and Delphi. VC++ and stuff like MFC was overly complicated, and the Java stuff was garbage. As neither VB6 nor Delphi used a C-family language, you had a lot of people using them just because it was a better tool, not because of a preference for the language.
The only thing I like about VB (.Net) is that it supports XML literal notation... which was crazy useful in the mid-2000's when dealing with Flash (it's own XML literal notation) as a data passing option. I know others that utilized that feature well for Xaml applications.
I'd much rather just use C# at this point. Actually, I'd rather use JS (node/deno) or rust than C#.
That's my point. Colleges have been teaching Visual Basic as a starter programming language for decades. Only in the last handful of years have colleges started switching to teaching Python first... after many years of neglect by Microsoft. My local college still has an entire specialization of their CS degree based on VB.
Python is where it is today because Microsoft has steadily ignored the language that brought new CS students straight into the .NET world.
Where? In the US, university-level intro to programming would have been in Lisp, Forth, C, C++, and/or Java before possibly trying something else in the mid 2000s, but I struggle to imagine an American university strong in CS touching anything in the VB namespace (5, 6, .NET) whatsoever.
1. The r/visualbasic subreddit is constantly fighting people trying to use it for very low-effort homework help (just tell me how to do this problem, rather than asking for specific issues). It's literally every other post to the sub.
2. Almost no Visual Basic books are still published today. The few that are, are college textbooks, which explicitly mention them as being part of a degree: https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Visual-Windows-Database-App...
Where does one get a degree in writing C#?