I've heard this anecdote told for years, over a decade, but I've never heard it occur in real life. Has anybody, really?
I was discouraged against both the programming in VB (it's beginner stuff and you can't make anything good with it, was the basic message) as well as against building/finishing the image view/organization tool (at the time ACDSee was all the rage, and I was going for something of that nature).
Well, sadly, that was all I needed to hear to realize that I was going down the wrong path and if I wanted to get into programming I would have to wait until college.
Thankfully I found PHP (gasp) a few years later.