The VB Stigma

[ClockMeister]

Ian Shlasko wrote:

C# feels cleaner and more efficient, and is easy to read if written correctly.

You know ... I prefer C# now myself, but your statement could apply to either language. Hell, well written COBOL is easy to read and I won't touch that language. God, this is getting to be an old discussion isn't it? What next, Linux vs. Windows? -CB

[Impenneteri]

Probably the reason is it's too english (readable) as compared to C# or C++ where the syntax looks nerdy. When non programmers look at a VB language they can understand some parts of it as compared to C# or C++ and also the reason why some programmers sees it as "kid's" language. I personally use VB and I think it is just as capable as C# or most languages out there.

[Lost User]

I don't consider type casting to be type unsafe operations. There are certain rules that are enforced for type casting as well

[agolddog]

Could not agree more (and not just because of bacon). I understand it's a nit (maybe a peeve?), but any language that the developer has to tell the compiler, "I want you to evaluate this expression as efficiently as possible" instead of that being baked-in is just annoying. Also, in the 21st century, we still need a continuation marker on wrapped lines? But, to answer the OP, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with VB.NET--good, solid development can, and probably does, occur in that framework. As pointed out above, though, the stigma of a trail back to VB6 (which certainly deserves the stink it has) has (perhaps unfairly) tainted VB.NET.

[Fabio Franco]

I am a combination of points 2 and 3. I had Visual Basic 4/5 as my first real programming language at the age of 14. Before I would only do DOS batch programs to automate some things I got bored of typing. When I first got in contact with it I was amazed, I was creating programs! Like any new beginner I did a lot of nasty practices, but that's OK, I was learning and reading my first programming book (Learn Visual Basic in 21 days, yeah right). The thing is that I matured and explored other languages. Working with C/C++ was very special to me because it was challenging and opened up a new world to me. It also made me look at VB with some sort of disdain. I mean, when I looked back it seemed like a kid language (I was a kid when I started to learn it). This actually illogically made me simply not like it. It's like when you don't like the taste of a food, you just don't like it. Later I started to really despise it because it was creating problems for me. I remember once liking not needing to declare variables and later having nightmares because that was allowed. Again a whole culture against anything with VB was growing inside me and that finally extended to VB.Net. Now, VB.Net is not VB6 I know, but I really inherited a lot of the culture from old VB. There are still ugly things the compiler will allow/assume that can make the life of a second developer very hard, specially on spotting certain bugs due to bad coding. Of course it's nothing compared to old VB, but VB.Net still inherits some of the things I hated of old VB. I'm not saying that C# can't have bad coding practices that create hard to spot bugs, I'm just saying that it has less, the compiler assumes and forgives less. Then there are other reasons to not like the language. These reasons are not really the language's fault, but of people who use it, for the following reasons: 1 - I still see too much of bad practices of old VB into VB.Net. For example, declaring huge amounts of global variables that are modified everywhere, that's just hell. 2 - It is still more likely to inherit bad VB.Net code than C# code (in my personal experience). I think that's true because VB.Net is more appealing for beginners and therefore will have bad code more often. 3 - Because C# is much more popular language there are a lot more resources on the web when you're looking for web. A quick search on codeproject articles and other sources will prove that. So if you're looking not to reinvent the wheel, chances are that you'll find it first in C

[Fabio Franco]

Looks like a very reasonable research project. It would be great to have my theory proved.

To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson ---- Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia

[Fabio Franco]

That was exactly what was missing on my handful of arguments for my VB.Net hatred.

To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson ---- Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia

[StatementTerminator]

In my current job we have legacy systems in VB.NET and I'm creating new systems in C#, so I'm going back and forth between the two all of the time. And yes, I'm using C# for new systems because I prefer it to VB.NET. I prefer C# because there are many things about VB that annoy me (like the use of newlines as statement terminators, verbose syntax, etc.). But really, I rarely notice the difference most of the time, because I'm focused on the logic not the language. You can do the same things in VB.NET that you can do in C#, it's all .NET in the end. I think that the anti-VB attitude among "real" programmers comes from BASIC's history as a simple, non-serious language for teaching novices. Those days are long gone though and VB.NET is a serious language suited to doing serious work, but the perception of VB as a kiddie non-pro language persists. Also, most experienced programmers are much more familiar with C-style syntax than BASIC-style syntax, so they are biased towards seeing anything with C-style syntax as more of a "real" or "professional" language. I prefer C#, but I see nothing wrong with VB.NET. Being a good .NET programmer has little to do with which language you use, the framework is the same. There is so little difference that I rarely even notice which language I'm using until I start declaring a variable the wrong way or add/leave out a semicolon in the wrong language. The only real differences come down to syntax, which is the most trivial part of programming. As far as I'm concerned the worst thing that you can say about VB.NET is that the syntax is annoying to work with, but it's a hell of a lot less so than with some other more highly-regarded languages out there (I'm looking at you, Perl).

[PhilLenoir]

Great post and I 100% agree. As an old fart that went to my first programming course in the 70s, I've seen this sort of childish stigma attached to almost every aspect of computing. Everyone is entitled to an opinion but mud-slinging and name-calling will get you about as much respect as a six year old throwing a tantrum! One other poster said that you can write good code or bad code in any language. With years of C and VB (all flavours) under my belt I believe that it's easier to write bad code in C (and probably C++ too) than in VB. C# doesn't have the failings that its ancestors had. I enjoyed my years of C programming and for some purposes it was the best tool. I have to say that on large projects I have always been more productive in VB though. The reality of the job is that we tend to be more productive in tools we know well and any decent programmer should be able to maintain code in almost any language. I've seen many prejudiced programmers from one silo get converted to another when forced to get familiar with a new tool. Guys, this isn't a religion and setting fatwahs on experts from another camp is NOT the way to go.

Life is like a s**t sandwich; the more bread you have, the less s**t you eat.

[Marc Greiner at home]

The biggest problem with VB is that it has too many design flaws. I noticed that people who started programming with VB have difficulties to understand why others discredit VB. C# has some design flaws too (says Anders Hejlsberg), but it is probably one of the nicest programing language ever designed.

[pwsJason]

VB.net is my primary language. I use it in an OO manner just as I would with C# but the stigma and lack of tooling (re: Mono) is getting to be a big problem. I'm looking around for a different job and I'm being careful to only talk about my experience on the .net framework rather than VB as a particular syntax because I've heard and seen people automatically dismiss VB without further thought. I'm productive in VB because I know and understand the syntax. While I can work in C#, I know that I'm going to have to climb the learning curve to get as efficient with the syntax as I am with VB. On the other hand, I need to do some things with my primary application in order to satisfy my customers and the tooling that I need to accomplish that and maintain compatibility is only available in the C# world. It's a shame that I have to change syntax as much because of reputation as tooling, but at least I'm still able to work in the framework so I can maintain that part of my knowledge and experience. I will say though that in my opinion... VB is no more verbose than C# in daily use and the 'shape' of functions is much clearer to my practiced eye than C# functions. I find that the commonly used style for C# eats up much more vertical space than a similar VB function and that horizontal space is very similar between the two.

SixOfTheClock wrote:

3. Those that have acquired an illogical, extreme hatred for it through an unholy combination of hearsay, rumour and code samples (often VB6) they've seen on the internet. They have never tried it and so are horribly uninformed on the topic. They say things like "VB isn't a real language!" and "VB is a language for babies!". It is with this group that I take issue.

This point gripes me to no end. I can't understand it from a logical perspective EXCEPT... that I've been in local college courses for both syntax's and found that the instructors treat the two languages in orthogonal manners. C# instructors teach OOP, while VB instructors teach quick and dirty almost linear techniques targeted more at Win-forms than at real-world apps. I have to wonder if this is systemic across the industry and helps to propogate the stigma against VB in the real world. This isn't to say that the local C# courses are very good mind you... when the advanced C# instructor taught ASP.net data access (one year ago) using techniques that were the definition of a SQL injection vulnerability and then didn't back down when

[Patrick Fox]

VB.Net is a .Net language. That means it's just as good as any other .Net language in terms of capabilities. That being said, there's something about the VB.Net programmer that sets them a class apart from someone who would pick C#. I find that VB programmers are the worst. They routinely don't understand the details of computer programming. When I hear of understandings like "Linq should be faster because it's fewer lines of code" I cringe. I know the correct response is to analyze the machine instructions produced from such statements, and to unroll all of the code and really look at the actual instructions sent to the processor. But years of having these discussions has taught me to just politely smile and reply "well, let me see if I can do better by writing all the code in C#". The response is always the same: skepticism at first, and then utter shock. They are always amazed that hundreds of lines of code in C# will plow through a complicated Linq query much faster. They don't understand things outside of their simplified VB.Net world. Sure, you can make the same mistake in C#, but the kicker is programmers who choose C# tend to know better. If your apps are simple and don't deal with large amounts of data, this is not a problem. But to turn a VB.Net programmer on a complicated task that is going to require some thinking about how to optimize it.... just say no. Find a real programmer who would say "I can do that in C#". That response alone is usually proof positive that the person knows how to do it.

[StatementTerminator]

Patrick Fox wrote:

But to turn a VB.Net programmer on a complicated task that is going to require some thinking about how to optimize it.... just say no. Find a real programmer who would say "I can do that in C#". That response alone is usually proof positive that the person knows how to do it.

Blame the programmer, not the language. The perception of VB as an easy language for people who aren't "real" programmers is exactly why there are so many bad VB programmers out there. It's a problem of perception rather than the language itself, and this dismissive attitude towards VB programmers is exactly why so many inexperienced and unsophisticated programmers gravitate towards VB. They think that it's easy, they use it like it's easy, they think it requires no real in-depth thought or knowledge, and the results are predictably bad. It's not the language that's the problem. There are good VB programmers out there, and there are certainly bad C# programmers out there. Code is easy to write but hard to write well, and that's true in any language.

[R Giskard Reventlov]

:thumbsup:

"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair. nils illegitimus carborundum me, me, me

[Patrick Fox]

I know, I don't disagree, but WHY is it so prevalent in this language that you find the most ignorant people? I know there are good VB.Net programmers, but I have never met one that wasn't proficient in at least one other language, either a close cousin like C# or something farther removed like C/C++ or Java. Real programmers know how to write code, not just how to use one language. I use VB all the time and there's a teeny tiny number of things it can't do compared to C#, none of them insurmountable. Most of them are just syntax related anyway. The ONLY reason I choose to use VB over C# is so that my coworkers can read and understand my code, or maintain it if I am out sick. The same VB code in C# might as well be a foreign language they can't speak. That's not true of all of them, but enough of them to mandate VB use. It's the lowest common denominator.

[BobJanova]

Oh, I thought he was talking about Java's hacked-on and very type-unsafe generics mechanism. For example, try this:

private void test() {
List list = new ArrayList();
addStuff(list);
for(String item : list)
logger.info(item);
}

private void addStuff(List list){
list.add(new Object());
}

This will give you a compiler warning in addStuff, but that doesn't help you if the non-typed collection method is in another library. The code won't fail in addStuff, though; it will result in a List<String> that contains non-strings!

[Old Ed]

You aren't missing anything. I've never understood geeky "strong" opinions about languages. I've had a 40 year programming career that has included several languages; Fortran, Assembler, C, C++, Visual Basic, JavaScript, Cold Fusion, and now VB.Net (for the past 6 years). Each language has to be accepted on its own merits. Features available in one may not be found in another. Syntaxes vary. Get over it. It is what it is. Visual Basic is thought of as a simple language designed to make the development of desktop applications easy. VB.NET however sits atop the .NET runtime and can be used to develop powerful server-side applications. C# sits atop the exact same runtime. Unfortunately VB.NET makes some think of Visual Basic. Okay, VB.NET is an enhanced Visual Basic. So what? The syntax used by VB.NET is totally different from that used by C#; C# is terse, VB is verbose. Again, so what? Personally I like the "wordiness" of VB.NET, though I have no problem reading well-written C#. In fact, learning C# is on my to-do list. I also don't understand the view that VB.NET programmers aren't "real" programmers. I certainly am and know there are many others. Many of those casting stones have never had to worry about freeing malloc'd memory, uninitialized pointers, or buffer overruns. So don't judge a programmer by the language they currently work in. Whenever I encounter someone who has intense distain for a language, hardware, or vendor, I just cut them off saying I'm not interested in the discussion, as I've seen some individuals virtually decompensate defending their views. As for your colleague who said: "What's the point in declaring things as private? Just declare everything as public. That way nothing will break." Just be sure their code is reviewed early and often.

[James Plotts]

I enjoy coding in VB because I can speed-read the language. James Plotts

[RafagaX]

Hi. The stigma on Visual Basic comes from its beginning, being an introductory level language, usually is the first taught to people that want to learn programming, either in courses or self taught, this lead to a bunch of people that can program but don't know or fully understand what they're doing, hopefully some of them go beyond and learn more advanced stuff, but many just stay with the basics and make terrible programs that need to be maintained later, by a more skilled programmer that (rightfully) will think that anything written on Visual Basic is shit. In summary, is not the language, is the majority of the people that use it what gives it a bad reputation, personally i don't like VB, i find the syntax too verbose, but i had to use it in a former job (in the .NET variant) and i learned to respect it as a serious language.

CEO at: - Rafaga Systems - Para Facturas - Modern Components for the moment...

[ClockMeister]

If you like Red Adair, there's an old John Wayne movie called "Hellfighters" that tells the basic story of oil fire fighting. Good old flick. -CB