I’m Going to Rip VB’s Head Off
April 28th, 2006[ Geek ]
Sorry for getting violent, or hinting at violence with the written word, but I really can’t stand Visual Basic.
Fine, I get it, C# and vb.net are almost indistinct from a functionality perspective. In the end it’s all compiled down to MSIL but no one writes MSIL, okay some probably do but not 99% of the development community.
As Nigel Shaw sums quite nicely in Not Another C# Versus VB Article, it is ultimately a culture issue. In the end Microsoft took such a soft road with vb.net that they left the door wide open to every ‘worst practice’ imaginable.
Some other quotes I had lying around in notes that I don’t know who to attribute to:
- “C# is a future language with international standardization muscle; the others are just legacy language reruns. Don’t write new code, especially class library code, in them!”
- Microsoft’s developer roadmap specifies that C# is intended for class library development while VB for RAD development.
- C# has much greater potential for widespread adoption, not only by developers but also by platforms, already having been released on other platforms (Mono 1.0).
- C# has the lead in language extension while VB continually plays catchup.
June 1st, 2006 at 8:18 pm
[…] There was a post on slashdot today titled “Making an Argument Against Using Visual-Basic?” I’m sure it’s clear where I stand on this one. C# and VB.NET are almost indistinct from a functional standpoint. In the end it is all compiled down to MSIL but we don’t program in MSIL and this isn’t primarily about language functionality. This should be about writing quality maintainable code. […]