Why VB.Net blah blah... [modified]

[rurouniRonin]

VB is designed to be human readable and easy to understand and it does the job just fine. The only bad VB programmers out there are programmers that are equally bad at programming in any other language - it's not the language that's at fault, it's the people using it poorly. Give a bad driver a bentley and he'll still crash it regardless of how awesome it is. Converting to VB just means a project will have slightly less OO control and capability. In most situations you don't need those extra goodies in any case. One day you will be saying exactly the same thing about C#. Back in the day people thought VB was awesome too. Languages suit personal tastes and styles and the task at hand. Like if I need to write a game I use C#, if I need to make a simple windows app I use VB. Give an example of why VB is terrible rather than just complaining about it and then give an example of why another language is so much greater :(

[Kalyan_A]

not sure what the fuss is all about! its a feature supported by (almost) all the languages out there!!! with all due respect, looks like you are just frustrated for having to work in vb!!! ..peace... :rose: btw... yes i do develop in vb most of the time :)

[ScottM1]

I agree with GDMFSOB, SharpDevelop is an excellent converter.

[Fabio Franco]

John Simmons already posted in his original thread an example of how VB is terrible. There are many others like having to turn Option Stric On to forbid conversions that have loss of precision. This and many other goodies of VB are just a trap to attract bad practices. I myself had to do a lot of re-learning and training to get rid of terrible habits I aquired with VB. Yes, VB is easier to understand for new programmers, it's more readable to them (not to me of course). I agree with you that the language itself isn't enough to tell if someone is a good or a bad programmer. But I think most will agree with me that there are much more bad programmers in VB than there is in C# and that are much more great programmers in C# than there is in VB. The car analogy is also perfect for that. How many excelent drivers are in this group? Car equiped with: Automatic transmission, traction control, ABS brakes, auto traction compensation and on this: Car equiped with: Manual transmission, no traction control, Hardcore brakes, Do high speed turns on your on skill That's my point. Nothing against someone prefer VB, but I'd never do a VB based project if I owned a company. [Edit] My original post was a little offensive and it's not to be taken serious and personally. It does not mean it's a fact, it's just how I feel about it without having to put all arguments on the table.

modified on Friday, November 19, 2010 6:53 AM

[Oyvind Sean Kinsey]

Is it time to start the flaming yet? C# has its pros/cons VB.net has its pros/cons For instance - I hate C# in VS as it doesn't background compile - change some stuff and you have no way of knowing if it will build before you actually build it - pretty annoying on large projects.. Which one is the best? We'll never know..

[MikeD 2]

I still don't understand why everyone moans so much about VB when all you have to do is to use it intelligently and it is as good as any other language I haven't come across a language yet (limited experience admittedly) that you cannot do something stupid in you can get in a car and drive it into a wall but it would be "amazingly bad practice" you can hold a gun or a knife and hurt yourself but it would be "amazingly bad practice" Sorry about the rant, having a bad day and was trying to divert myself when I read this thread

[rurouniRonin]

Haha, basically at the end of the day it all comes down to situation and preference ;) If I knew someone was a terrible dev I would make damn sure they use a strict managed language like C# so that no funny business happens - unless they are making a calculator in which case I don't really care :} I mean none of the popular languages are inherently bad languages or terribly structured. Given a decent dev they can all shine and accomplish any of the tasks that are given to them. Some of them are just unfortunate enough to attract the less skilled, especially the ones that are very easy to understand and develop in - poor VB really gets the short end of that stick, grandpa Delphi as well. Then more skilled devs have to come in afterwards to fix the mess and the raging begins ;) Personally, I have a very unnatural dislike for Java (like some have for VB) even though I know it isn't actually a bad language and is actually pretty good at a lot of things. No matter what anyone tells me though, I will never, never use it out of choice :3 In all honesty I only use VB now for small applications or applications where I am the only developer or can trust the devs I'm working with. I really enjoy implicit conversion and my coding style and way of thinking prevent the horrors that could otherwise result from it. Don't get me wrong, I've raged aplenty over the years but I'm past that now so its no longer and issue. Nowadays I'm normally doing PHP dev so it doesn't matter anymore ;3 I will say though that if my C++ skills were better I would use that and only that - C++ is the epitome of sheer awesomeness (barring the fact that it's old and hasn't got a lot of the fancy new stuff). This post of mine is rather pointless once all is said and done but i like speaking my mind and if you've read this far it wasn't a total waste ;) PS: C# is cool and I wish the VS environment would be enhanced and improved so that parsing and the display of parsing results in the text editor would not be so miserably slow. One thing VB beats C# at! ;)

[rurouniRonin]

*hand on shoulder* the week is nearly over, hang in there!!

[Fabio Franco]

It's great you speak your mind, so yes I've read it all. ;) I too find C++ the almighty cool, but it's much harder to work with. I've been there, but need a lot of practice to go back there, and I have bought a few books to leverage my skills in C++ for when I have time to go for it. Anyways, all in all, I have a big rant on VB and don't mind the slowness in the editor :-D

[MikeD 2]

lol, thanks for that, I feel better now

[Nemanja Trifunovic]

Not that I really care, but why is __object__ better than @object? Both are "decorated", right?

utf8-cpp

[kwells7101]

I agree with you. Good Luck!!!

[Gary Wheeler]

That's true. I still dislike the notion that the compiler provides a feature that states: "Yeah, this is a dumb thing to do, but here's how I'll let you do it..." when there's a simpler method around it. The compiler has to provide this feature, which increases its complexity, testing time, and so on, for a limited audience. It's like Apple selling every iPod with 500MB of disco that you can't delete, just because some loading dock worker at Apple likes the stuff.

Software Zen: delete this;

[Slow Eddie]

Yes John BUT 1. It blows up your whole argument about the so called superiority of your language 2. You VB Haters make me sick. It's just syntax and what you know 3. It seems to me that you are as unreasonable and pig headed about it as your boss - more so if all other programs in the shop are in VB.net... 4. The golden Rule applies "the man with the gold makes the rule" 5. And Finally "Nyah, Nyah....Nyah,Nyah,Nyah!

[Michael Kingsford Gray]

"VB is a scourge on mankind" Irrational Bigot.

[jsc42]

I am going to advocate the opposite position. ;P Reserved words are the scourge of a programmer. There shouldn't be any at all. Languages like Algol 60 had no reserved words; language constructs were represented by symbols, e.g. the if symbol was not the word 'if' even if the compiler writer decided to use the letter 'i' and 'f' concatenated to represent the symbol because the hardware of the day did not have a native if symbol. Half a century later, that forward thinking philosophy has gone out of the window (no pun intended). Why should I be restricted in my choice of words - if there is a word that accurately and succintly describes what I want, what right has some anonymous progam language designer got to ban me from using it? For example, if I have a method to stop a task that is running, what could be more natural than calling the method Stop? It should not matter that the language designer has also realised that Stop is a good way of saying stop doing something. I never thought I'd say this but "Well done, VB designers". The language should free you to express your thoughts and ideas, not contain you to some restrictive speech patterns. This is not 1984. No Orwellian Newspeak here, please.

[djdanlib 0]

Typo or not, "foul swoop" is an excellent term. Ugh, I feel bad for everyone involved in this project. At one consulting job (when VS2005 was the bees knees), I had to update seriously nasty spaghetti code written in VB5 by manager-types who thought they knew programming because they could barely handle some rudimentary VB3. It was approximately on the level of someone learning to code for the first time and I could see the bad habits as they developed by reading code from older to newer files. Physics-related things were simulated because nobody could figure out how to do basic calculus for the physics, and the results varied widely depending on what fraction of a second you simulated per iteration. They had global variables everywhere and everything used a horrible mix of the globals and similarly named variables inside loops. Yeah, there were GOTOs all over the place, including one label - seriously - called "wtfamidoing" inside an approximately 6-levels-deep nested FOR-NEXT birds' nest (which was an extremely buggy physics simulation), with comments like "I don't know why this works", "good enough for now" and "arggh, figure this out later" by the GOTOs that took you there. Months later, everyone was still giving me out-of-scope stuff to add/fix/alter "as long as you're in there"... and the product still wasn't shipping... and management was okay as long as they were getting paid! So I share in your pain, guys. I got to share plenty of jokes about the fictional COME FROM statement with my coworkers, though. Comedy gold.

[djdanlib 0]

Seconded! If I wanted my code to look like perl, I'd use perl!

[tobywf]

Hmm, that sounds great - until you have to work in a team, where other people have to read your code, then it's just egoistical. That's why we prefere C# over VB. Much more consistent to read (think stylecop, fxcop), among other reasons.

[G Tek]

VB is easier to type - the letters V and B are right beside each other on the keyboard. To type C# you have to go all the way up 3 rows AND hit shift!