Starting with PHP and Visual Basic got me on the way to making cool stuff really fast, but I think they both made the leap to "real" programing languages later. With web development, I didn't really move on from PHP's "HTML with extra stuff" until I came across Ruby on Rails, and I'm not sure I ever really got past VB for high level GUI desktop stuff, but I was able to get into some lower level C in high school, but I've never really done desktop GUI programming since other than a little bit of Cocoa/Objective-C with earlier version of Mac OS X.