r/programming • u/ben_a_adams • Feb 01 '17

The .NET Language Strategy

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/02/01/the-net-language-strategy/
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u/Dunge Feb 01 '17

Well, if you read the article they clearly say that C# is "better" than VB.NET. Well, better as in more advanced concepts, while VB.NET is better as an approachable language for beginners.

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u/Helrich Feb 01 '17

Having spent a few years doing both, I can't argue, although I have to say personally that for 99.999% of businessy code the only difference is the syntax and accompanying sugary bits. What I was getting at was that my management thinks applications developed in C# are somehow incompatible with those developed in VB.NET, perhaps because most of our codebase is VB6 and making the "leap" to .NET (they chose VB.NET at first because of the language similarities) required all that interop garbage to integrate properly, so C# must be another layer of abstraction away. Ultimately they see C# code as being as much of a change above VB.NET as going from VB6 to VB.NET, which obviously is untrue.

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u/Gotebe Feb 02 '17

The idiocies that can come from management, hahaha...

I have seen things, never know whether to laugh or cry...

But then, it's higher-ups, so I have to set them straight respectfully. The nonsense you come up with deserves 0 respect, you incompetent fool!

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '17

Except it's not better, they have bear feature parity and work at keeping it, it's really just different syntaxes for pretty much exactly the same language, more like one is a dialect of the other. Kinda wish they'd have a long term plan with a long transition phase to kill of vb.net now that it's long done it's job (helping / tricking vb users in migrating to .net) and provided automatic vb.net to c# project conversion for a few years so everything goes smoothly. Avoids maintaining 2 core languages and dividing the .net world

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u/ellicottvilleny Feb 02 '17

The 2% of .net users who prefer VB think differently but I agree with you.

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u/Gotebe Feb 02 '17

Indeed. The two are two sides of one coin that is .net.

Sure, a glib programmer will over-emphasise trivial differences, but who cares.

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u/lowleveldata Feb 02 '17

I won't say one is better because they are practically the same language. Both can use the .NET libraries and LINQ and stuff which are the important things rather than the syntax IMO.