My dad wasn't much of a programmer, he was a businessman. he had an old copy of vb6 that worked perfectly well and that was my first exposure to programming. Because of that, most other languages with their non-existent gui frameworks and messy IDEs seemed inferior in comparison as getting anything useful done on them was a pain. The jit interpretation allowed me to test my code without having to wait for compilation, at the same time, I can also export it as an compiled executable. Compiled vb is much faster than languages such as Python and Ruby that supposedly allow you to code fast. The current generation of .Net languages take ages to compile making test-driven development a huge pain sometimes.