Being a somewhat older dev (is 59 "somewhat" older?), I learned BASIC first on a Commodore VIC-20, taught myself Turbo Pascal (v1!), went on to learn COBOL at college, and spent 14 years developing on IBM mainframes, with brief diversions writing a medium sized apps in Revelation BASIC (a variant of PICK BASIC) and a few utilities in Modula-2, before side-stepping over to VB5 and VB6. And then came .NET.

Because of my Basic background, I thought I should start out with VB.NET, only to find that I kept trying to do things the "old" way and it was driving me nuts (okay, more nuts). Being that I had done some work in C, I thought I would give C# a whirl to see how that went. And OMG, that was like emerging from a dark tunnel into clear daylight! Totally unexpected. And I used to make disparaging noises about C being a "write-only" language -- "so hard to understand that a C programmer couldn't figure out what his own code did 6 months after he wrote it", an observation made by semi-famous novelist that I thought sounded cute at the time.

So, by virtue of being a bit unfamiliar with C, C# was paradoxically easier for me to learn .NET programming in than the far more should-be-familiar Basic paradigm. I still like VB6, but have come to love C#. The best programming language on the planet.