Even though I started this whole religious war thread, I don't really want to continue with it (but I'm too proud to delete my comment). Here is my rebuttal in a nutshell; VB is not succinct and therefore not a powerful language[1].
Succinctness is definitely not the sole measure of programming language's power. If it was then APL would have become mainstream. In that case it actually worked against adoption of the language even though it was very capable otherwise.