Advice on other languages?

Hi all - trying to expand my horizons a bit (partly for personal, partly for professional reasons) and am interested in what your thoughts are about languages that are reasonably easy to transition to from VBA. I know it's a lot of personal preference, and depends on what you want to do with it, so I'll try to be brief:
I like VBA because it works, right out of the box. I use it to build custom workflow tools for people I work with, generally passing data back and forth to some simple SQL tables. I build a UI with forms, some custom logic, connections to the tables, and can make it read from and write to our company's proprietary software. It can be made as simply or as complex as needed. No need for analyzing and testing out IDE's and text editors, no need to install things that other people may or may not have, no problems with modifying environments...just open and go. I like the inherent editor, and how easy it is to step through the code and write results back to a spreadsheet, so you can see what it's doing, clearly.

For years, on and off, I've tried Python, and quite frankly, can't get it to do much of anything without an inordinate amount of time and help. I've created a couple of applications for distribution at work, and people use them, but what took weeks to do, could have been done in Excel much easier and with a significantly better UI. So Python is out of the question - in fact it's fair to say that the mention of it elicits a borderline visceral response from me.

But what else would you suggest I look at? I'm thinking HTML / Javascript may be okay, but not sure about C# or Ruby or PERL and have heard people talking about LISP (which I know very little about). Maybe I'm just too old to learn something new, but I sure would like to try.

Thank you for any feedback! I've been a huge fan of the people on this site for a very long time, and your thoughts will be very sincerely appreciated!

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VB.Net ?

Based on your use case, I’d say .net with either forms or wpf, forms is closer to what you’ve used in the past though MS is pushing UWP as the successor to both, you can read more here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...our-technology

Those are for building the ui, as for the language, though you may feel more comfortable in vb.net I’d suggest C# for the following reasons:

1. It’s more popular, all the examples you are likely to find for doing something, or when asking for help will likely be in C# - so it’s easier to get help
2. Vb.net smells like vba but it’s completely different. It requires a substantial shift in mindset, it’s completely object orientated, you’ll probably get very frustrated very quickly as you’ll try to use vba concepts and code and it just doesn’t work like that - as it’s so conceptually different, I know a lot of vb6 coders made the jump to C# as it made it easier to learn new concepts without old syntax confusing things
3. It makes other languages easier to understand. Few languages area as verbose as vba, more are c like, so if you learn c# it’s much easier to be able to read and understand code in other languages

For your use case I’d keep away from the web, that’s a world of pain that adds little benefit to the types of application you want to build. It requires a vast amount of learning, server all languages and architectures just to make basic things work.

Staying in the Microsoft world C# and the ui options above make a lot of sense since you like an integrated development environment. Visual studio makes all of this easy, once you start using something like Python, you start to have to make a lot more decisions for things like connecting to databases, which ui libraries to use etc. MS wrap all this up for you so you don’t need to worry about it.