I grew up in C, C++, Java and - for £income purposes - trained up in c# .Net ... but 5 years ago I moved into a vb.net shop and you know what, I actually quite like it now, the feature set is 99.99% on parity with C# and i actually LIKE that it's in english, in C# we have obscure words like virtual & abstract while the VB equivalents are overridable & mustinherit .
I think part of the hate against VB (shocking pre .net days aside) is snobbery from people who consider themselves "proper" programmers who think that if the code is too to understand they'll loose their hard earned super-clever status
it's like programming languages are deliberately designed to use obscure terms, syntax, symbols and squiggly characters for no reason other than to obfuscate it from puny humans