bboy_sonik Wrote:but many developers i know say its a real bad way to start for noobies - simply because it is old and so different to "more useful/practical" modern languages of today.

I don't know about the old BASIC languages.  From what I've seen from VB, I'd disagree.
Just because it doesn't follow C syntax, like half the other languages out there do, doesn't mean that you shouldn't start with it.
VB has it's quirks and oddities, but for a beginner, these are of little importance.

bboy_sonik Wrote:I thought that the difference between scripting and programming is just that programming is more 'low-level', it can directly interface with a hardware/software on the fly for example... in Win32 terms; this would be the  Hardware Abstraction Layer/Win32 API or whatever it is (repectively). And scripting is actually just a bunch of internal calculations being manipulated graphically to the GUI/Console?

In general, scripting is used for more high level tasks, but can you define a barrier?
I'm not totally sure, but I believe more widely:
Scripting » Interpreted
Programming Language » Compiled

Scripts can be made to access hardware, or API or whatever.
Visual Basic and Java are "semi-compiled", but since they're compiled, it's considered a programming language, as you cannot use techniques available in scripting languages (ie eval()).

In Windows, I don't think Windows actually lets any application touch the hardware, other than drivers.