When comparing Visual Basic vs Pyret, the Slant community recommends Pyret for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Pyret is ranked 50th while Visual Basic is ranked 62nd. The most important reason people chose Pyret is:
You can use the development environment without installation in your browser and share your programs via the Google Drive integration.
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Pros
Pro Very simple and efficient language (in terms of number of lines of code)
Pro Easy to learn
Pro Capable language
Compiling to the same intermediate language as C# and compiling against the same .NET libraries, the differences between C# and VB are largely syntactic. Most VB features even have a 1:1 correspondence with C#.
Pro Huge community
Being Microsoft's introductory language, visual basic has a strong and large community.
Pro English-like syntax
Pro Flexible, won't get in the way of a beginner
A beginner developer can worry about the code logic first, and then learn the language. Visual Basic lets you do basically anything if you really want, while still having the power to be a fully statically-typed and object oriented.
Pro Sibling to C#
If you don't want to start with C# because of its high learning floor, you can start with VB. It is dead easy to switch between the two.
Pro Easy to deal with Win32API
Using platform invoke, it's very easy to use the win32 api in vb.net. Neat and clean syntax. Not a mess like c# (meaning those "{}"s).
Pro Online IDE
You can use the development environment without installation in your browser and share your programs via the Google Drive integration.
Pro Designed for education
A primary goal of Pyret is to be an excellent choice for a first programming language. This heavily influences the development of the language. For example: if it's felt that some aspect of the language could be made better for the language's users, The development team won't hesitate about implementing breaking (non backwards compatible) changes into Pyret for the greater good of the language. This makes Pyret an impressively "wart free" programming language.
Cons
Con Almost as bad as Python, but less used
Con Bad reputation
Being a visual basic programmer, you're unlikely to be taken seriously by other programmers. According to the 2015 Stack Overflow survey, it was voted the second most dreaded language among developers.
Con Tends to get clunky due to prebuilt assets
Con Missing IDE features
For example: content assist, go to declaration, etc.