I think its kind of funny that Visual Basic doesn't inspire the kind of hatred that it once did. Now PHP has taken its place. Reading through the comments there seems to be a level of fond remembrance going on. In the past, if you used VB 6 or lesser, you were not seen as a real programmer.
Maybe we will stop the PHP hate as well and move on to a new language to kick around.
People have forgotten all the terrible language warts all over VB. (From what little I can recall, the hatred is slowly seething back upward.) PHP might lack any sense of style but it's nowhere near as bad as VB.
Of course, there were a lot of good things about the VB environment, and Microsoft could have straightened-out the syntax without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But the strategy was to legacy the whole heap of VB/COM/etc.
Maybe we will stop the PHP hate as well and move on to a new language to kick around.