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

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! ;)

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 :(

It's not pretty but that kinda thing does come in handy from time to time. Like in SQL when you would like to name things semantically - like calling a field [Option] because, well, it's an option. I agree it's not really the greatest feature but it does allow for a bit more flexibility and so long as the person coding knows what they're doing it's not a problem. It was also mentioned earlier that it's there for backwards compatibility so if in a later version of a language they want to add a new keyword then they can do so without running the risk of completely mangling older code. Smarter people than us have developed all these languages so there's pretty much always gonna be a good reason behind these things whether we like them or not ;) PS: When will they add inline if statements to VB? :(

That's how I feel about Java... ;) VB is just a simpler language than C/C++/C#, etc. to learn, that has slightly less capabilities and a different syntax. If it's used correctly (the same as if any other language is used correctly) it gets the job done and done well. It's all a matter of personal style at the end of the day :3

There's nothing wrong with VB, it's the coders that use it poorly that are the culprits :(

Haha! They really make sure they get the most out of their free version with those ads ;) They're so big and red!! I did have some baddies that Avira couldn't remove that Norton did but otherwise I've only heard good things about Avira.

Amen to that!! They should do away with pre installed trial software altogether, if we want a trial version of something we'll get it ourselves! It's always such a time waster... :( Ja nee, McAfee is the worst AV in existence at the moment. I'd feel safer having nothing running than having that running... really, I wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty of viruses and things that use it as a launch platform :| And I stand open to correction but in my experience Trend is also a monster fail at the moment. They unsuccessfully made a release that was 100% Vista compatible that literally drowned the OS and CPU and made it impossible to do anything more than stare at the desktop (because it was hanging). They then released a much awaited update and entirely new version which... did exactly the same thing except the version number had changed. I haven't had problems with Norton/Symantec at all as a single user but I can say that whenever this topic comes up I always hear mention of Nod and lately MSE. Also Avira but that seems to be a more European taste.

The best part about that is it is a very common occurrence and always will be ;) Don't worry though, there is almost always gonna be someone else out there dealing with even worse :3 Sometimes the things you see will scare you or otherwise simply shock you but at the end of the day it's part of the job and you will do what you can to make things better. Plus they give us a chance to compare war stories so why not!?! ;)

Some languages are just more resistant to sloppy coding (like where type safety is strictly enforced, etc.) but VB(6) and PHP are by no means weak or bad languages and they each have their pros and cons depending on the situation. The only reason people perceive them as such is because (as has been mentioned in earlier posts) they are easy to learn and very flexible so unskilled devs often get their hands on them and do terrible, terrible things! When you see what skilled developers can do with these languages you will be amazed at how powerful they really are. Be proud of being a VB dev (hopefully in VB.NET since VB6 is slowly disappearing) and ignore people who knock the language. After all, being a developer has nothing to do with syntax.