First of all, discontinuing VB doesn't mean you have to stop using it. I worked on a project which was compiled with Visual C 1.52, for many years after it was not supported. The project is used by nearly every engineer at the company where I work. We are still devleoping the project I work on now in VB6, and have no reason to bail. For new projects, it would make sense to look into VB.net or some alternative.
Python has classes, but not templates. However, you don't have to use classes in your program, but it will make life easier if you learned them. Python's classes are not as complicated as C++, it's a much better language to learn from. VB has classes too, and if you haven't used them in your programs, then there's a good chance you can program that way with Python too, but I wouldn't make a point of it. VB has a much better IDE than the IDE's for Python, although Eric3 is one of the best, and is absolutely free. VB's ide is it's strongpoint, not the language itsself. If you need to do Gui's then it is extremely usefull to learn the basics of classes, your code will be much simpler in the long run. There are many gui toolkits/frameworks for Python, but the foreunners are pyQT, wxPython, pyGTK, and TK/Tkinter. You don't have to worry about pointers though :-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list