when Visicalc first came out, i read a magazine article written
by a small business owner. he had put together a WHAT IF model
for his business and was enjoying himself and modeling all the
various "i wonder what" ideas he had had for many years.
we did the same thing as soon as we copped an Apple II.
you can pry my spreadsheet and PC out of my dead fingers.
they are that important.

as a business owner, i make my decisions based on the skills of the programmers involved, my tolerance for demanding that documentation be done regularly, and whether the 'team' can produce and keep current a modular flowchart-roadmap of what the project 'is' 'does' and what resources it 'uses' and 'connects with'.

in the MS world, their NET language and development tools are really the only way to go.
if you are doing Unix/Linux or web stuff, you can avoid VB/VBNET.

our favorite tools for heavy data work are VB Studio , VB (.NET compatible language), MS Access, and SQL variants.

if we have a real puzzle of a program, it is far better to see if a highly talented person can solve it with the language they know and think in, than forcing a new fit along the way.