I learned Visual Basic 6 as my first language. I appreciated that my application could for the most part run on any Windows machine without a massive framework as a requirement. Don't get me wrong though, I love .NET entirely! I just enjoyed Visual Basic 6, because it felt native, and to some degree was. I still wish there was a native solution with a RAD environment like that, Delphi is nice but the syntax is quite friction filled for a beginner. Nowdays C# is the clear winner, although not yet a native solution and not yet multiplatform without friction.
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More on topic:
My personal opinion is that scripting languages like Python and Ruby, and for the brave teachers Lisp (Racket, Clojure, etc) make excellent programming languages. Instead of forcing yourself to learn the requirements of C-like languages, you get to focus a lot more on the concepts, and a lot less on syntax issues that I see more than often enough with new students to programming.
I believe up to VB5, then in VB6 it was finally natively compiled. I had projects in VB6 that people would try to decompile, the best they got was Assembly. Unlike .NET which without external tools will give you back almost everything (except of course comments).
Edit:
More on topic:
My personal opinion is that scripting languages like Python and Ruby, and for the brave teachers Lisp (Racket, Clojure, etc) make excellent programming languages. Instead of forcing yourself to learn the requirements of C-like languages, you get to focus a lot more on the concepts, and a lot less on syntax issues that I see more than often enough with new students to programming.