I'm old enough that my first language was BASIC (on a PDP-11). Of the languages I've studied though, I consider structured programming in Pascal to be the most valuable; the techniques I learned could be applied to almost any other language. For example, no matter how complex, a properly structured program will not use "GoTo" statements or associated labels.
I believe the techniques are particularly suited to C, C++, and similar variants. Other than making mods in others' stuff, I am not extremely familiar with Visual Basic. My most remarkable programming feat (IMHO) was some RBase database code that wrote and executed its own routines.