Why is VB being forsaken?

[MacRaider4]

Like a lot of people I started my career with VB (VB 5 to be exact) and have over the years picked up on other languages and what not (HTML, PHP, C#, C++, JavaScript). Right now about 70% of my work is done in VB.Net, 10% in C#, 15% in HTML/PHP and the rest in C++. (Now if you want something to complain about, try the lack of apparent support of C++ in VS 2010 and then get back to me) I've yet to have a application I've written in C# that I couldn't have done in VB. It just struck me that on that particular day I wanted to do some C# work instead of VB when I was getting started. The one nice thing about C++ is you have lots of control over how things work, the one bad thing is you have lots of control over how things work... Where as in VB and C# you can get a lot done and not have to worry about a lot of the heavy lifting (as mentioned by someone before) in a fraction of the time. Like a lot I really hope they keep VB around for many, many more years as it really is a great language for many things.

[Not Active]

Oakman wrote:

when people start claiming that their personal preferences are laws of nature

You have mentioned this several times. Where has anyone in this thread stated that? I see balanced statments like, "its not the language's fault", or opinions based on experience. No where have I seen anyone stating their way is the best and only way and a 'law of nature'. Warning: Opinion follows [opinion] I have encountered more VB developers who get upset when the question of VB.NET vs C# is raised than C#. Why is this? Its almost like Apple minions when discussing an Apple device vs another brand. [/opinion] Disclaimer: The previous statment is an opinion of the author and should not be viewed as a Law of Nature.

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I know the language. I've read a book. - _Madmatt

[Chris Boss]

I won't comment about Microsofts reasons or motives in changing VB, but I will comment about the Basic language and why some may prefer not to switch to C#. BASIC has a very, very long history and despite all the criticism it has received it has endured. Why ? Because Basic is a more natural language as far as its syntax. Even non-programmers can examine Basic code and make some sense of what it is doing, unlike C code which is an acquired taste. I have been programming in Basic since 1975. I learned some Fortran, gotten plenty of books on C (interested) and even purchased a C compiler or two, but just never picked up the language. Very quickly the syntax of the language (C) was counter intuitive to my first language Basic. Now I did take the time to learn some machine language (wrote a compiler using Basic for the 6502 CPU for the commodore 64). I also learned some intel assembler and wrote some library code for use with PDS 7.1 using assembler. To me machine language and assembler was easier to pick up than C. Over the years I moved on to VB 1.0, 2.0 and finally 5.0 Pro (stopped there). Amazingly, it was all the OOP stuff which I began to dislike. While OOP has its place, OOP is not the programming panacea it was first thought to be. I personally prefer more procedural style coding over OOP and I am far more productive with such code. I still love the Basic language and it still lives despite dot.net. For the last 10 years I have used PowerBasic, rather than any Microsoft Basic. I still like VB, but it has changed too much for me and is not efficient enough for me. From my experience I find it is best not to learn too many different programming languages. You know the old saying, "jack of all trades, but master of none". I find it better to pick the language you are most productive in and to become an expert in it. If you want to learn a second language, I would recommend it be assembler (or machine language). Learning machine language makes one appreciate what a compiler does even more. One of the beauties of Basic is its readability. One can pick up code written years ago and quickly make sense of it. Now one good reason the Basic language should not be changed (the core language left alone), but rather simply add new features to it, is that if languages keep changing every few years, then much time is lost in having to rewrite code for a new syntax. When you can have perfect code which was written years ago, simply reused today, then you don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. Sure

[Oakman]

Mark Nischalke wrote:

Where has anyone in this thread stated that?

I don't play those games, Mark. I was using the USENET 20 something years ago and have probably seen every type of debate happen in that time, here, there, and elsewhere. As a result all the little tricks of "I never said exactly that" really bore me. Where I realized I'd misattributed something to you that you didn't say, I apologized. But for categorizing my opinion of an attitude that i believe is displayed by far too many developers in words that seemed to have upset you far beyond their intent or content, I have no need nor impulse to retract anything I said. If you have something to say about what I think of the two languages, or of people who cannot handle both with equal ease, I'd be delighted to hear them. If you want to continue to drag red herrings into the discussion, I'll give you the last word and go do something important like sort my socks.

The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots. R. A. H.

[Not Active]

Oakman wrote:

I was using the USENET 20 something years ago and have probably seen every type of debate happen in that time, here, there, and elsewhere.

So you've heard it all and can close your mind to new thoughts. I aspire to be like you one day.

Oakman wrote:

I have no need nor impulse to retract anything I said

No one has asked you to do any such thing. Why so defensive?

Oakman wrote:

If you have something to say about what I think of the two languages, or of people who cannot handle both with equal ease, I'd be delighted to hear them.

You seem to do a lot of reading between the lines and find things that aren't there, but I guess that comes the vast years of experience you have. I bow to your superior ability to inturrpt others meaning and intentions.

Oakman wrote:

If you want to continue to drag red herrings into the discussion

Red herring is an idiomatic expression referring to the rhetorical or literary tactic of diverting attention away from an item of significance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring_(idiom)[^]) Yes, I'm sure at your age you are easily distracted :laugh:

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I know the language. I've read a book. - _Madmatt

[Lost User]

jim norcal wrote:

so why isn't it promoted more by MS and others?

..it is. Visual Basic has been a catastrophic succes, primarily because it's too easy :) Why isn't it used more? Well, the universities here don't want to touch anything "basic", even if 4 out of 10 jobs is VB-specific. That makes managers more reluctant to use VB in a new project, and most managers want to be able to shout that they're using the cool C# - not 'basic'.

Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss:

[wbaxter37]

I don't know that's it's being forsaken, but one has to wnder about the future. PowerShell is being used in place of VBScript. It has the entire Windows GUI at its disposal. As of VS2003 UI development with C# is as easy as VB6 and VB.NET are. Is there a business reason for continuin with VB at all? The only real justifications I see are VBA for Office (which benefits from VB.NEt development) and support for a very large VB user base. Unlike Apple, MS doesn't hand its users out to dry. At least, not any more. That said, I never even considered VB.NET going forward. C# makes more sense to me as a syntax, probably because of all the C/C++ code I've written. I always liked it better than all the BASIC languages I've used (TinyBASIC, Rocky Mountein BASIC from HP in various incarnations. QBASIC, IBM BASIC, VB2, VB4, VB6, and some others for which I don't know the name).

[giuchici]

There was nothing in what you said that deserved a down vote but nevertheless it still happened. Au contraire, you just stated some facts but somebody could not take it. I bet that's somebody who even in C# cannot finish anything and his code is uglier than hell. It happened that in the last 5 years I used both languages equally and every time I program in one I find myself missing features from the other one. I like them both; they are great languages with just "a bit" of succinctness advantage for C#. But hey don't forget that somebody's gold can be somebody's dirt. Not everybody loves the curly braces, and this goes for any other features. So again, I agree that there's nothing important about this VB vs. C# debate. Important is what you create and I am positive both languages will allow anybody to do things so great many of us will never get there. However, back to the original poster's question. Sadly it is just life, things, species ... disappear. I was a FoxPro/Visual FoxPro programmer. They disappeared (not quite, but soon). Even though there was still a ton of VFP code out there (jobs too) there was a moment when I had to leave that boat as otherwise I would have been stuck with it and today look for niche jobs or contracts in Visual FoxPro. Don't fight the current; plus, it is not a good thing to be too sentimental in this world. Look at Silverlight which is another concern of so many people. VB may be dying after a long good life almost as a wise old man with a fulfilled life but with Silverlight is like killing a child (spoiled one but nevertheless ...). However with all the lack of samples and the silence around it I don't think VB's death s going to happen that fast. You probably have another 2-3 years to switch to some other language :D. It's just a programming language after all (vocabulary and syntax are much simpler than the ones of a natural language) so be prepared and again don't be sentimental ... just let it go. Cheers

giuchici

[Fabio Franco]

I am a former VB X programmer and I can say that I never want to look back. The most horrible programming practices I've seen was in VB. I'm not saying that you can't do horrible things in other languages, but VB (VB and VB.net) by far is the language I saw the most coding horrors so far. Maybe because it's more appealing to begginers, maybe it's because the compiler is more forgiving or maybe it was by chance. The thing is that I started to dislike it once I was enlightened by the C like languages. And I think you will too if you give C# a chance. Sometime ago I had a hard time debugging VB.net code like this:

Dim someBoxedBool As Boolean = Nothing

someBoxedBool = False

If (someBoxedBool = Nothing) Then
'Initialize it
someBoxedBool = False
End If

Of course this isn't real scenario but I had a hard time figuring out why it always evaluated to true if the value was False or if the variable was null. There was no way to determine if the variable was assigned a value or not, this made me loose a few hours as the compiler did the magic that performs implicit casting. I know that if I was a seasoned VB.Net developer I'd catch this earlier, but magics like this can make the living hell of a developer. And I think many C# developers like me hates this and other magic stuff of VB compilers. I know that VB.net community have been dwindling in the past few years. I doubt that it will go away anytime soon though, but I definetely wouldn't bet on its future. If I were you, I'd definetely learn C#, as it has a bigger market than VB and it's growing much faster than VB. I believe it's a win win scenario. Learning new stuff is always good, it gives you a different perspective, so give it a shot. If you like it move, if not, you have a more complete resumè and more flexibility.

"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" - Homer Simpson

[Renzo Ciafardone]

Well i wrote my very first "real "program in BASIC, since it was/is an interpretative language there was no need to compile it, or do anything else other that run it once you had the code ready. It was a program that told you the type of triangle based on it size length or angles by the way. I even remember i did it on a 8086 with a monochromatic amber screen, 5 1/4 floppy, NO HARD DISK whatsoever, sadly i don't remember the DOS version. So I know basic is really "beginner friendly", but not much later i learned pascal, i immediately though that BASIC "style" was too verbose, THEN i learned C, oh boy that was a beauty to write on, the first couple of weeks i spent more time REWRITING code that worked just to try to make it more compact, 10 lines of atomic instructions cramped on a single crazy statement, for the heck of it. This was early 90's, i was on my teens and everything i did was for my own use, so "readability" was an alien concept to me... I do think of C style not as something superior per se, but that is just right, and most programmers i know feel the same. Problem is there are lots of smugs that will tell you that "other" languages suck, but thats being just stupid. I would like to VB to die, but just because i have this personal philosophy about life, if 2 thinks do exactly the same, there is no reason for both to exist, is a survival of the fittest thing. VB does not do anything better or worse than many other languages, so i don't see a reason for it to continue existing. But it is not ME who will decide that, it will be the environment...

[KP Lee]

GuyThiebaut wrote:

A friend of mine was very much into object orientation with a langauge called REXX.

That's interesting, I haven't used REXX for over 8 years now. When I did, it was on an IBM/TSO mainframe and had no coorelation to OO whatsoever. (Similar in style to vbs.)

[cpkilekofp]

From Dictionary.com:

el·e·gant   /ˈɛlɪgənt/ Show Spelled
[el-i-guhnt] Show IPA

–adjective

1. tastefully fine or luxurious in dress, style, design, etc.: elegant furnishings.
2. gracefully refined and dignified, as in tastes, habits, or literary style: an elegant young gentleman; an elegant prosodist.
3. graceful in form or movement: an elegant wave of the hand.

For most of us who use the term, programming elegance is expressed by the third definition. C, C++, etc. use fewer symbols to convey more meaning, the C-like syntax imparting grace through requiring fewer decorations. Thus, it appears to be purely a matter of taste at first. My experience, though, is that their are more programmers who are better programmers who appreciate the elegance of C-like syntax than there are programmers who are better programmers who prefer the wordier but more easily remembered keywords and forms of languages like VB.NET, FORTRAN, and COBOL. That experience may be influenced by the fact that I've had to maintain C code written by BASIC programmers as well as BASIC code written by C programmers - let me tell you, the better attempt was NOT made by the BASIC programmers. C-like syntax is harder to learn than wordier syntaxes, so it's less likely that any given BASIC programmer can learn C that it is that any given C programmer can learn BASIC, given equal exposure or lack thereof to the system being learned. Unfortunately, given this observation, since smarter people usually write better code, it is strongly suggested that more of that better code is being written in C# that is being written in VB. I expressed this opinion well before the advent of .NET when my client (and former employer at the time) expressed surprise that I would reject C/C++ for a new project he was staring. First, I told him, you'll need a database management system for what you want to do, which means that if you have Access, you can build a prototype with little difficulty; second, Access used (and still uses) a dialect of BASIC, and BASIC programmers are cheap and easily disposable because fewer of them are going to write code that requires deep intellect to understand and maintain, thus new programmers will spend less time getting up to speed on what their predecessors were doing. Note that the application my client wanted to build, while complex, was not "rocket science"; if it had been "rocket science", I would have recommended C/C++ as the develompent language without hesitation, simply becau

[PIEBALDconsult]

Well we have horrible practioners in both languages here. It really does come down to experience and training in both (or any) language.

[PIEBALDconsult]

Not necessarily, for instance: VB.net has certain restrictions on how you can format your code (e.g. linebreaks) that C-like languages just don't have. C-like languages have multi-line comments, VB.net does not. In C# I can make an event based on a delegate that returns a value, in VB.net you can't. While that's not something most situations require, it's nice to know I can when I need to. C# has auto-implemented properties, VB.net does not (at least not in the version I have to use at work). That's what comes to mind at the moment and my dinner is getting cold.

[Oakman]

If someone is used to one language and regards having to use another as a trial, no amount of discussion, explanation, or examples will convince him that his problems lie within himself and not the language. Suffice to say that for every goody that C# has, VB.NET has a one,too, a different one. For every gotcha that VB.NET has, C# has one, too. When it comes to C# and VB.NET, there's nothing wrong in preferring one language over another, but folks who think that their personal preference represents a real-world value judgement that should be recognized by all is making a mistake. Developers who go so far as to claim that all or most of their peers who use their language choice are superior in skills and ability to those who use the other, are amusing. Developers who refuse to learn as much as possible about any language that might get them a job are shooting themselves in the foot.

The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots. R. A. H.

[Oakman]

Fabio Franco wrote:

know that if I was a seasoned VB.Net developer I'd catch this

So aren't you saying that if you knew what you were doing, this bad code wouldn't have been a problem? Most people with a year of VB under their belt would have ripped it out very quickly. I agree that newbies can write some really stinker code. And it does appear that a lot of the "PLZ HLP- Do my rgnt homework!" kiddies from southern Asia are trying - and failing - to write VB rather than C#. That may be, I suppose, the fault of the reputation that classic VB had - but VB had that rep because it was being compared to C++ not C# which is no harder to learn, no more likely to keep coders on the straight and narrow, and certainly no more likely to produce maintainable code than VB.NET. Because I have had to deal with converted COBOL programmers in a couple of shops I, have seen just as much putrid writing beginners code in C# as in VB.

The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots. R. A. H.

[Fabio Franco]

Oakman wrote:

So aren't you saying that if you knew what you were doing, this bad code wouldn't have been a problem?

Not really, that code wasn't written by me and things like these are not very intuitive to debug. What I meant is that if VB.Net was my primary language I'd wouldn't loose as much time to spot this as I did. In any case implicit behaviors like this are not easy to spot and can give a hard time to debug.

Oakman wrote:

not C# which is no harder to learn

I still believe VB.Net has bigger appeal to beginners, therefore that might be one of the reasons I stumble into more coding horrors on VB.Net than C#.

Oakman wrote:

I, have seen just as much putrid writing beginners code in C# as in VB.

I guess this in the end comes to personal experiences, like I had. I agree that bad code can be done on both languages.

"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" - Homer Simpson

[Oakman]

Fabio Franco wrote:

that code wasn't written by me

Just so you don't think I was accusing you of writing it, I knew that. I meant that it seemed possible that your inexperience with the language made you hesitant about making a judgement that wouldn't have been the case had you known it as well as I assume you know C#

Fabio Franco wrote:

I guess this in the end comes to personal experiences

I ended up working for 3 fortune 500's in a row. They had been mostly writing for minis that talked to mainframes and after Y2K had senior developers who they wanted to convert to writing code for WIN Server. It seemed that in every case they wanted to be "C" programmers, not "VB" so they had taken a developmentor course in C# and were happily writing COBOL procedurals in .NET. :rolleyes:

The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots. R. A. H.

[Fabio Franco]

Oakman wrote:

I meant that it seemed possible that your inexperience with the language made you hesitant about making a judgement that wouldn't have been the case had you known it as well as I assume you know C#

You got it.

Oakman wrote:

were happily writing COBOL procedurals in .NET.

:~

"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" - Homer Simpson

[Kenneth Kasajian]

I honestly don't get this kind of thinking. Why do you have a hard time learning a new language? You learn new technologies all the time, why not a new language? And why only use one language? Use many. Don't just stick with C#. Everyone should look at languages like Python and Scheme. It will make you a better programmer, no matter what language you use.

ken@kasajian.com / www.kasajian.com