[HN Gopher] The chronic suffering of the VB.NET community
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The chronic suffering of the VB.NET community
Author : myu701
Score : 85 points
Date : 2020-03-18 12:45 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (anthonydgreen.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (anthonydgreen.net)
| manigandham wrote:
| A decade too late. This is like complaining that Flash and
| ActiveX are gone. The world has moved on. C# is easy enough to
| learn and unless there's maintenance required on legacy code,
| it's irresponsible to continue using VB on any new projects.
| swiley wrote:
| When was it ever responsible to use VB on new projects for
| anything more than hacking excel?
| smacktoward wrote:
| Don't confuse VB with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications,
| e.g. Excel's scripting language). VB was super-useful for
| building things like graphical frontends for databases, back
| when such things were typically delivered as desktop
| applications rather than web applications.
| benbristow wrote:
| You can still do WPF/Windows Forms with C# if you wish just
| as you would in VB. Drag and drop and double click to write
| code, all that good stuff.
|
| Probably better to just go web-based nowadays though for
| the instant portability of targeting all of
| desktop/mobile/tablet all in one go unless you have a
| reason not to
| smacktoward wrote:
| Right, you _can_ do that stuff with modern tools, but
| there 's just not nearly as much demand for it these
| days.
|
| And back when there _was_ demand for it, VB was among the
| best tools available to do that job.
| ptx wrote:
| VBA is the exact same language as VB 6, with the same
| implementation and the same IDE. It lacks some options
| (like compiling to an executable and setting some module
| attributes) and the forms library is different, but the
| language is identical. Since diverging, VBA has had some
| small revisions, with VBA 7 adding support for 64-bit
| pointers.
|
| You might be confusing it with VBScript, Microsoft's old
| vaguely VB-like alternative to JavaScript that was used in
| Internet Explorer and (I think) classic ASP.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Just started working on RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and
| the tool we primarily use is UIPath. Ironically it's built on
| VB.Net and requires VB syntax if you want to do anything mildly
| complex.
|
| Not sure why they went that route, but I've ran into several
| issues when using REST services and other functionality that
| would be easy to get done in C#, but are time consuming and
| painful with VB.NET.
| vb6sp6 wrote:
| If you were going to train and support users that may not
| already be programmers, it makes a lot of sense to use a
| language that is similar to English.
| alkonaut wrote:
| VB is dead. Get over it. It was a concession to an army of
| classic VB devs to not risk losing them to other technology when
| .NET and C# were born.
|
| Since then, every VB develooper has had _two decades_ to realize
| that VB.NET never was a "new VB", but just a C# dialect. It
| offers zero value over C#, and it's so closely related that
| anyone who knows VB.NET can pick up C# instead in literally no
| time at all.
|
| I don't see why the author brings up F#. F# is just as much a
| second class citizen in the .NET world, but it is a project of a
| great community and of ms research.
| nradov wrote:
| For better or worse, VB is still very much alive as an embedded
| language inside Office. It hasn't been enhanced in years but it
| probably won't be removed any time soon.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| is VBA the same as VB.Net? I thought there were differences?
| nradov wrote:
| It's almost completely different. There is only some
| superficial similarity in syntax.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| > It offers zero value over C#
|
| I loved VB .NET XML literals. Less relevant today with JSON all
| the things, but I did choose VB .NET a few times over C# just
| because of these guys. Made for amazingly readable (to me) XML
| wrangling code.
| steverb wrote:
| Used to occasionally import VB libraries into C# for that
| sort of thing. :-)
| uk_programmer wrote:
| A little known secret is that in the VB namespace in .NET
| full fat, there is a really nice CSV file reader/writer.
|
| https://coding.abel.nu/2012/06/built-in-net-csv-parser/
| runevault wrote:
| F# is an interesting case. It's a second class citizen but it's
| also the testing ground for a lot of features that end up in c#
| niclo wrote:
| In general, many of the "new" features introduced in the past
| years, both in C# and in many other languages, simply come
| from the world of functional programming. So yes, F# in the
| natural playground for these new features simply because it's
| functional first.
|
| Also, in many other ways is an incredibly powerful language,
| which leverage in a vry powerful ecosystem, sadly is kinda
| left behind without big sponsors.
| runevault wrote:
| You're not wrong. I need to put more time in with F#. It
| feels so elegant when I use it, I just have a bad habit of
| defaulting back to C# when writing .NET code as that's what
| I know best.
| keithnz wrote:
| that's F#s problem. C# is a good language, and while F#
| has some great things ( discriminated unions,
| computational expressions, pipline) that make for better
| ways to create software..... they aren't so much better
| that it justifies the learning curve to get good at F#
| compared to just writing things in C# ( unless of course
| you are a F# programmer and then you can't live without
| all your toys... ). Also, good luck hiring F# devs. My
| own experience at my company, I did a bunch of things in
| F#, but upskilling people just proved too much of a side
| track that I ended up rewriting all the F# in C#, and it
| was actually amazingly quick to rewrite in C# ( I didn't
| like the C# as much, but it's fine).
| smacktoward wrote:
| As someone who was a VB developer back when VB.NET first shipped
| twenty years ago, I'm kind of surprised by this. VB.NET was very
| clearly a second-class citizen in the .NET ecosystem even back
| then. While Microsoft paid lip service to supporting it equally
| with C#, it was very clear from the huge volume of documentation,
| tutorials, books, etc. they put out for C# compared to the tiny
| volume for VB.NET that C# was where they really wanted developers
| to be. And syntactically VB.NET felt more like C#-with-training-
| wheels than "classic" VB anyway, which reinforced the impression.
|
| Given how big C# ended up becoming, I'm wondering why anyone
| committed to staying in the .NET ecosystem would have stuck with
| VB.NET all this time. What's the attraction? I could see it as a
| transitional stage to get classic VB developers started on the
| road to C#, but as a long-term solution it seemed doomed to
| chronic suffering from birth.
| 98codes wrote:
| I recognized that I had to move from VB.Net to C# because
| that's where the jobs were 15 years ago. Anyone sticking it out
| now won't quit until they have zero options left.
| S_A_P wrote:
| I did a lot of VB6 around the time C# took hold. I initially
| thought that switching to VB.NET was the move, but with the
| .NET framework the whole paradigm shifted anyway so I figured I
| would go the way of the curly bracket. I was also tinkering
| with C/C++ at the time doing DSP/VST plugin development so
| while VB was a great RAD/Line of business platform it quickly
| ended up feeling verbose(most of the time, but sometimes not)
| and clunky. I soon could parse curly bracket languages much
| more quickly as well. Be it nostalgia or stubbornness I don't
| see a problem with sticking with VB if that is your jam, but
| you cant expect the world to not move on either...
| nogabebop23 wrote:
| We moved from vb6 to vb.Net and within about 2 years it was
| clear that c# wa the path forward. We transitioned after that
| but still have legacy apps that combine both. It was actually
| the smoothest, least painful technology dead-end I've ever
| experienced.
| kogus wrote:
| I think I must be the only person alive who actually prefers
| Pascal-style syntax (VB, VB.NET, Delphi, PL/SQL) to C-style
| syntax. There are lots of small nice things, such as distinct
| keywords for end blocks ("End Try", "End Loop", "End If"), and
| syntactic sugar like the "With" keyword. Intellisense in Visual
| Studio still seems to work better in VB.NET than C#. It does
| look comparatively simple; but I'd prefer the complexity of my
| code to be mitigated by the syntax, not exacerbated by it.
| tabtab wrote:
| I have to agree: VB has better syntax, at least for my head.
| In addition to better block-boundary-matching, I like the
| type name coming after the variable name. It's silly to put
| the type first, especially for long ones. And it has a much
| better SWITCH/CASE statement. Having to use "_" for line
| continuation can sometimes be annoying, but at least you
| don't have to deal with semi-colons.
|
| In C-style syntax there's often disagreement on how to format
| blocks, but there's rarely a disagreement in VB: there's
| naturally only one choice.
|
| Maybe take the best of VB and Pascal, clean up the key-words
| by tossing legacy inconsistencies, and produce a next
| generation "word-oriented" style. #MVBGA!
|
| Related: https://wiki.c2.com/?TheRightWayToDoWordyBlocks
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You are not the only one. I can see a few around me, and
| there aren't that many developers here :)
|
| Personally, I think every balanced marker (parenthesis, block
| beginning/termination, brackets) adds a maintainabiliy cost
| and is better replaced by some unbalanced alternative (on the
| case of blocks, semantic whitespace is the current winner).
| The largest the thing inside the markers, the higher the
| cost.
| mattmanser wrote:
| I've had to deal with a codebase that's part VB.Net and part
| C# for the last 6 years.
|
| I don't really feel any pain switching between them, apart
| from VB.net is a bit annoyingly verbose and I always forget
| how to do linq lambda functions in it.
|
| One tip I would add is that you can change the colour of the
| matching {} when you're in a block scope. VS actually
| highlights the opening and closing of the block. Usually not
| much of a problem due to auto-indenting, it can help a lot
| with complex code.
|
| For some idiotic reason the default is a very light grey, but
| if you make it darker or a different colour, picking out
| ending } or starting { becomes trivial.
| aloisdg wrote:
| You should try https://viasfora.com/
| naavis wrote:
| What makes distinct keywords for end blocks nice in your
| opinion? I feel they are maybe overly verbose.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Harder to mismatch.
|
| In C# the end to an if and a try both look the same. In VB
| they don't.
| 51Cards wrote:
| This. I flip between both languages all the time and
| without issue but I have to say in VB.Net I never have to
| go looking for that random missing brace that is throwing
| the entire structure off. I spent enough time doing that
| in my LISP days. :)
|
| As for the complaints of something being verbose, I see
| people constantly adding comments to close braces to
| indicate what it was they closed.
| graham_paul wrote:
| in my opinion, if you are having issues with mismatches
| braces, you have too much code in your file. I have seen
| this issue with God classes (which seem to be more
| prevalent in VB codebases)
| [deleted]
| danielbarla wrote:
| I remember this slightly differently; the change to C# was
| swift and rather brutal, but VB.Net was very much the default
| choice for most organisations transitioning from VB. In
| 2001-2002, seeing C# in production eluded a response along the
| lines of "wow, you guys are quite brave, kudos". By 2003-2004
| though, the switchover had pretty much happened, nevertheless
| there were still swathes of legacy code to be maintained. At
| least, this was my experience in the handful of companies I
| worked with around then.
|
| I've seen several moderately large and active projects (5+
| developer maintenance team) still surviving to this day,
| running on VB.Net. In most cases though, these were started in
| the mid-2000s, simply due to manpower questions, not language
| advantages. I recall being moderately surprised even circa 2008
| that the author of CSLA.Net (an interesting object-oriented
| framework) was mostly using VB.Net. I guess from their point of
| view, they were more proficient in that languages, and the cost
| of switching was too high. I definitely don't see any rationale
| for benefits, akin to say F# vs C#.
| m0xte wrote:
| I actually quit a company in 2004 because they decided to go
| VB.net first. Was a good move because they are still on it and
| up shit creek now. I'm not sure how they managed to retain any
| staff as long as they did.
| greatjack613 wrote:
| As someone who started programming in VB.NET, this is so true.
|
| It was a great language for beginners that also had enough oomph
| to build commercial applications, everyone who I spoke to who
| actually used it loved it.
|
| Why a 1 trillion dollar company like microsoft can't hire 5
| dedicated devs is beyond me.
| aliswe wrote:
| That goes back to if the decision to assign them is strategic,
| or not. If they wish to deprecate the language, it will not be
| done. Also one could argue that that small code change which
| took 5 minutes could have cost the company hundreds of hours
| supporting their clients if something happened. So that would
| make that very small change a very big change, not based on
| effort but on impact.
| 60secz wrote:
| > I am a PURE VB.NET developer. I have never used any other
| language full-time for any significant portion of my education or
| career--a client project here or there but nothing that somehow
| made me NOT a VB developer. How am I supposed to engage?"
|
| Every developer should be polyglot. Adapt or die.
| smacktoward wrote:
| I dunno, there are plenty of slices of the programming world
| where you can quite profitably work in a single language for
| most or even all of your career. If you specialized in Java
| twenty years ago, you'd have skills that are still in demand
| today and will likely still be in demand twenty years from now
| (as long as you keep current with changes to the platform).
|
| But betting your career on a single language is definitely a
| big bet. And any bettor will tell you one of the key skills is
| knowing when to cut your losses.
| balfirevic wrote:
| It's fine to happen to develop (or only have developed) in a
| single language - you might have found your niche and all
| that.
|
| But the way the author of the article put it is just so weird
| - choosing the word "pure" in all caps - like it's a point of
| pride, or big part of their identity.
| nxc18 wrote:
| I'd advocate for the opposite: VB is never going to get first
| class support. It was clear that I should jump ship when first
| learning it back in 2010.
|
| Microsoft should just kill it (aka put it into mature support)
| and give clear guidance that developers should move on.
|
| If you can learn and understand VB.NET you can learn and
| understand C#. It's time to rip the band aid off.
| kelvin0 wrote:
| Imagine how the poor Fortan and Cobol devs feel.
| vb6sp6 wrote:
| I imagine they feel pretty good considering the type of money
| they make
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Is there a lot of money in Fortran? Anyone could learn
| Fortran in a week if they wanted, and there's tons of
| research assistants who know it already. How's it lucrative?
| uk_programmer wrote:
| VB gets a lot of hate. But the language is perfectly fine for the
| most part. One of the most annoying things about VB.NET is that
| projects need to be configured with certain options out of the
| box otherwise it allows you to write some very sloppy code.
|
| I still use VB.NET for creating quick tooling for either myself
| or non-technical users. There doesn't appear to be anything else
| really these days for doing that. The newer options from
| Microsoft tend to enforce a lot of patterns, which just slow you
| down, when for small tools you don't really require all that
| guff.
|
| I hope with an open source .NET compiler it will be possible
| VB.NET to carry on well beyond Microsoft's culling.
| rufius wrote:
| Why uhhh... why wouldn't people just start writing new components
| in C#. Surely learning C# is not beyond them?
|
| It's not like there's a compatibility issue. Just stop writing
| it.
| czechdeveloper wrote:
| There are 1 to 1 transpilers between languages (with few
| exceptions such as LINQ to XML in VB) that are really good.
|
| I've migrated hundreds of thousands lines of VB to C# in past
| years.
| aljarry wrote:
| Had similar experience - I transpiled a ~120kLOC legacy
| winforms app in day and a half - mostly spent fixing build
| errors between not exactly translatable elements / missing
| rules in transpiler.
| contextfree wrote:
| what if they don't want to?
| eropple wrote:
| They're welcome to maintain their own ecosystem. Microsoft
| made it clear over a decade ago that VB.NET was symptomatic
| treatment at best.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Are they going to pay Microsoft enough to maintain VB.NET
| just for them?
|
| Or they could re-implement and maintain VB.NET themselves?
|
| Those are their options. You can't just demand that someone
| provide you a product if they don't want to.
| gus_massa wrote:
| As a VBClasic user that never made the transition to VB#.NET, a
| wish you the best but I loose my hopes a long time ago.
| bluedino wrote:
| I've ran into it at a couple jobs in the last decade, there's
| more VB code out there than people might expect.
| w3mmpp wrote:
| Out of curiosity, do you develop professionally in VB classic?
| vb6sp6 wrote:
| I do. We build a desktop app used by businesses around the
| world, including some mentioned regularly on hacker news :)
|
| At the time we stared (1999), vb seemed like a great choice
| for desktop apps: It had a ton of built-in controls for
| building UIs, it was quick and easy to do so, and there were
| tons of dlls and ocxes we could tap into from a ton of
| different vendors.
|
| The vb language was also appealing on a larger scale because
| you could take existing knowledge to other areas of the
| windows ecosystem: excel\outlook automation, classic asp if
| you need web stuff, windows automation\administration, and ie
| scripting.
|
| MSDN was also an incredible learning resource
|
| I attended a few small group sessions with microsoft in the
| early days of .net and we were planing on migrating ~100k
| lines based on what we were being shown. It looked awesome.
|
| I managed to get hold of an early beta version and did the
| obligatory "hello world" and was gut punched. It took a few
| seconds to load took like 20ish mb of ram.
|
| It seems laughable by today's standards, but in 2000 our
| target customers were still clinging to win98 and the pc's
| generally had garbage specs. IT people were _livid_ we were
| _wasting_ 4mb of their ram to run the vb6 version of our app.
| We lost sales and spent hours on the phone justifying our ram
| usage (fun times). A 5x increase in ram was completely
| unacceptable so we put it on hold in hopes that the release
| would improve things.
|
| Things didn't improve so we put the plans on hold in hopes
| that vb7 would get released or they would reduce the runtime
| requirements.
|
| Then something really strange happened: We almost lost a sale
| because the IT guy thought we were using .net and he refused
| to install the .net framework because it "used too much
| disk". I had to take 2 meetings with this guy and was
| literally screaming into the "WE DONT FUCKING USE THE .NET
| FRAMEWORK, DONT FUCKING INSTALL IT, WE DONT USE IT". And this
| wasn't the only incident. I'd get pulled into calls and would
| have to talk irate IT guys down from the ledge and assure
| them that no .net framework was required to run our program.
|
| Today, things are much different, no one cares about using
| gigs of ram or hundreds of gigs of disk space. But there is a
| new set of problems trying to explain how a desktop app works
| to someone who only knows how to admin web apps.
|
| And the .net framework eventually become ubiquitous via
| windows updates and other, more critical software, starting
| to require it. But the early days were really, really odd (at
| least for us and our customers).
|
| We aren't complete luddites though. We do utilize some .net
| (asp.net\vb.net) on the server side for a few tools. We have
| a mobile app (xamarin\c#) that has some companion features,
| raspberry pi (python) for some "smart" displays, Arduino, and
| have started to look at blazor to the replace the desktop
| app.
|
| I might still recommend vb6 for a desktop app with the caveat
| that it is a pain in the ass to install on later versions of
| windows.
|
| tldr: vb6 mostly just works and is a great tool for desktop
| apps
| aliswe wrote:
| Anecdote:
|
| I remember in 2007 or '08 a colleague was assigned to
| Ericsson, to work on a time reporting "application" made in
| VBA, contained in a gigantic Excel spreadsheet. I also
| assisted in some troubleshooting.
|
| It was called Tratten, swedish for "the funnel", and I
| remember him telling me that when he presented it to some
| kind of stakeholder board and when said "sometimes, the
| application gives a 'read error'" and the whole board
| reverberated "read error?!" amongst themselves ...
| foepys wrote:
| I know somebody that does. It's working surprisingly well
| considering that it has been deprecated since 2001.
|
| Interop with C# is working fine and as long as don't have to
| do too much in the VB part of your program, you can just use
| it as a "library" (which is technically isn't because you
| should only call C# from VB, not the other way around). The
| only two disadvantages I know of are restriction to 32-bit
| and no easy CI/CD support. Maybe also that it doesn't support
| HiDPI forms and Windows just scales it up but who is really
| expecting that from a 90s technology?
| w3mmpp wrote:
| Yes, and I guess it could also be ran into a VM with
| Windows 95-98 or that other open source clone, can't
| remember the name now and still be useful.
| jacobush wrote:
| Wine + Linux and ReactOS would work equally well.
|
| Wine would probably be easier to setup.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| They make the argument that it would take very little effort for
| MS to maintain VB.NET.
|
| If that's true, I wonder if part of the reason MS is killing VB
| is that it doesn't serve any necessary purpose, and it is simply
| uncool. I wonder if "uncoolness" is a primary factor.
|
| It sounds silly to write, but think about it -- technologies live
| and die by coolness. MS is doing everything they can right now to
| shake off their uncool past, and VB is certainly a relic of the
| uncool past.
|
| Developer share is crucial. You get a lot of developer share by
| being cool. Thus, being cool is very important. Damn, _I_ want to
| drop a Medium article on hackernews now with my hot new take.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| It likely takes 3-5 developers just to maintain what they already
| have until end of life.
|
| Whenever people come up with these tiny estimates for how much
| "effort" things take they ignore the organizational overhead and
| maintenance costs. For example, when changes are made to the
| CTS/CLS[0] a lot of time is spent considering how those changes
| will impact other .Net languages, that's a cost/overhead even
| without actual work on those languages.
|
| So it might take "3-5 people to keep VB.Net alive" but only if
| you ignore the man-hours lost in other teams (.Net Framework,
| Tooling, Libraries, etc) and the people already required to
| maintain existing VB.Net Support (3-5~). 15-20 people is a more
| realistic conservative estimate.
|
| Plus the language's popularity is almost gone:
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
|
| [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/common-
| type...
| nv-vn wrote:
| With the interest fading so much, I think Microsoft probably
| just wants to nix the project as something official. While it's
| not expensive for them to maintain, I imagine they don't want
| to be tied to a dying product like that. They probably want to
| actively discourage development of VB because VB does not fit
| into their vision of the .NET ecosystem anymore. I think that's
| the point the author is missing here.
| nv-vn wrote:
| One thing the author failed to consider when discussing F# was
| that F#'s community leans heavily towards compiler/programming
| language people. Historically, MLs have been extremely popular
| for writing compilers and a lot of the folks using F# today
| either come from that background or have been exposed to people
| from that background and learned about some aspects of compilers.
| I would wager that maybe 25% of F# users are _capable_ of somehow
| contributing to the F# compiler compared to maybe 5-10% for C#
| and VB.NET. I also imagine the F# compiler's source code to be
| drastically smaller and simpler given both its history and the
| ease of writing compilers in F#.
| josteink wrote:
| Edit: disregard
| contextfree wrote:
| The VB compiler is written in VB: https://github.com/dotnet/r
| oslyn/tree/master/src/Compilers/V...
| [deleted]
| Arnavion wrote:
| >I also imagine the F# compiler's source code to be drastically
| smaller and simpler given both its history and the ease of
| writing compilers in F#.
|
| I agree that the F# compiler's codebase is much smaller than C#
| (wc suggests 417k lines for dotnet/roslyn:src/Compilers/CSharp/
| vs 190k lines for dotnet/fsharp:src/, which is hopefully all
| the right files).
|
| But as far as simpler goes, the compiler is quite a bit
| complicated by having to implement F# in terms of .Net. Enum
| variants are actually classes inheriting from the class
| representing the enum, modules are actually classes, core
| library members being called by different names in F# vs not,
| the desugaring of computation expressions into state machines,
| ...
|
| Then there's F#-specific stuff, like the core library, having
| two different kinds of parsers (#light on and off), two
| different kinds of generics, quotations, ...
| ourmandave wrote:
| My take away from this is either:
|
| 1. Start a go-fund-me to get a VB.net team started.
|
| 2. Start work on an open source VB.net to F# transpiler.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I worked for a shop that was heavily invested in Visual FoxPro,
| after that time had come and gone. I spent a few years switching
| most stuff to Python and PostgreSQL, then moved to another city.
| When I checked in with some friends from there to say hi, I found
| out that they'd replaced all my "weird Python stuff" with good,
| standard VB.Net (starting in 2013). I didn't know whether to
| laugh or cry (with strong leanings toward the latter). It's too
| bad. I love that company and the people there, but I'd like to
| smack the person who convinced them to go for that particular
| rewrite, or at least make fun of them in public.
| smacktoward wrote:
| The hitch there is that there's not so much an ecosystem for
| individual Microsoft products as there is a Microsoft
| ecosystem, where all the products are puzzle pieces that snap
| into each other. So if you're in that ecosystem and a Microsoft
| product you're currently using stops being available, there
| will be a strong gravitational pull drawing you towards other
| Microsoft products to fill the gap. You can fight that tendency
| by bringing in non-Microsoft products, but even if they're much
| better than the MS alternatives, MS people are always going to
| feel weird about using them. It's like telling them to defy
| gravity by standing on a chair all day.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| I think his dismay was that they chose VB.Net over C# for
| their rewrite.
| kstrauser wrote:
| You're right. If they'd picked C# (again, in 2013 or so!),
| I would have been disappointed but understanding. Hey, it's
| not my project anymore and you've gotta pick what works
| best for you and your team, not to satisfy my preferences.
| But to finally be on an open non-Microsoft platform, and
| then to change back to it _for VB.Net_? That 's just
| mystifying.
| eitland wrote:
| The obvious choice for anyone who has tried a few languages
| should probably have been C#, but personally, if it was my
| choice to make and the team was experienced in Visual Foxpro
| I'd probably choose VB.Net if they wanted it.
|
| The alternative would be C#.
|
| Full disclosure:
|
| Languages sorted by when I learned them:
|
| - Basic
|
| - Visual Basic
|
| - C
|
| - Assembly
|
| - Java (well, I "learned" that I was hopelessly ineffective
| with it. Still got a B.)
|
| - Javascript
|
| - Python
|
| - PHP
|
| - AutoHotKey
|
| - Java (actually learned it)
|
| - Perl
|
| - Delphi
|
| - C#
|
| - VB.Net
|
| Reasons:
|
| Once I actually understood the value of a real typed language
| there's no way I'll go back except for scripting and small one-
| offs.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Thing is, there was only one person there who was really
| maintaining the VFP stuff. We'd already done the switch for
| everything else.
|
| I agree about strongly typed languages. I'd never give Python
| and its strong typing to switch to a scripting language.
| mellosouls wrote:
| "Chronic suffering" seems a wee bit hyperbolic, especially in the
| current apocalyptic climate. Perspective, please.
|
| OT I remember when VB.Net first came out and some VB6 devs were
| rather sniffily referring to it as "Visual Fred" due to the lack
| of resemblance wth VB beyond keywords.
|
| It was obvious from the get go VB was now a second class citizen,
| and c# was the future...
| wvenable wrote:
| VB.NET's only purpose _should_ have been 99% compatibility with
| VB6. Instead, it was too much like C# to be compatible and too
| much like VB6 to be consistent.
|
| I had lot of experience with VB6 back in the day but I moved
| straight to C#.
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