Classic VB comes from an entirely different era. It's hard to express how bad programming languages/environments were in general at that time. From that perspective VB is pretty decent. But we're sorta blessed these days that there really aren't any terrible programming languages anymore. Although we're also cursed that an environment like VB for building applications isn't really possible anymore.

One thing I would correct is that VB does not have extremely loose typing. VB is strongly typed with one exception: the variant type that could hold any other type (kinda like "object" in Java/C# but implemented like a union).