Is it, though? For example, VB puts four different ways of passing arguments right in your face: values by reference, values by value, object references by reference and objects references by value. Python only has the last one and doesn't make you think about it.

And without "Option Explicit" VB does something very unhelpful (also seen in PHP): misspelled variables are created on read and silently converted to the required type, giving you nonsense results. (With "Option Explicit" enabled it gets verbose and tedious instead.)