The problem with Visual Basic's syntax is the lack of power it gives you and the habits that it gets you into. In it (and all of Basic) there is close to no variable declaration (at least in perl you can use the $, @, %, and % signs). In the for loops you can not get the loop variable to go up by a number other than 2 (for example in 'for foo = 1 to 20', 'foo' is going to increment by 1 each time. It gets really annoying and ugly...
Whereas in a real language like Perl (or if you want graphics- perl/tk, everything is organized in a master/slave fasion and easy to follow!