Good points guys.

Sonoslap, if all you want to do is put together some programs and get a flavour of what you might be able to do then go with VB or similar.

It's got a relatively easy learning curve, and more importantly you will be able to create GUI applications within the first hour of reading a tutorial.

KiXtart is a lovely language - easy to learn and fun to work with, but to achieve anything "pretty" or "interesting" you really will have to work quite hard - much harder than with a language with drag 'n' drop interfaces. Once you've mastered another language you may come back to KiXtart because it is more appropriate to a job you need to do.

Part of the reason the KiXtart community loves the language is because of the tricky things you can do to get the language to perform tasks a long way from it's true purpose. This is great for us, but not so useful for someone starting out.

Using VB has it's drawbacks. It simplifies the coding process and hides an awful lot of what is going on. This will make it harder for you to transition to other languages.

You might like to consider Java as a good compromise. From what I've seen it's very C++ like, you will learn more about the underlying process than with VB, there is no cost, and quite usefully it is portable across a number of different platforms. If you don't have the runtime environment, you can download it from the Java home page