Visual Basic is useful for when you want to create the odd Windows-only application that would just be used for simple things. Because of VB's simplicity, it's a short process to get a simple package deployed. VB is probably easiest to use for value-manipulations such as calculators or text converters, or perhaps COMAL is (but that's harder).VB is useful to develop the right frame of mind for programming, and you'll sure as heck need one if you want to program professionally. Other than that, it's pretty useless. Because it's not fully compiled into binary or assembly, users will also need the Visual Basic runtime files to run the program, which is annoying.If I hadn't already started with VB, I would have chosen something like Python to begin with - it is platform independent (meaning you can use it on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, whatever).