I'm a software engineer with over 35 years and I'm with you 100%. I've programmed as a contractor in pretty much every language on every platform and in every environment. What I found is that many Software Engineers or IT professional in general are like religious fanatics. I have my favorites just as everybody else, but atthe end of the day I believe a true professional works with what he/she has available and gets the best out of it. Just like with religion, faith is a basic pillar of those fanatical discussion. If you believe that Windows is worse than OSX, or that LINUX is the OS for professionals, or that VB is a baby language, please be my guest. I found just like you that often behind the facade of the self proclaimed professional is an individual with little knowledge an/or skills. Having said that as the manager of software engineers I have always tried to keep my staff "marketable" for their own sake. Unfortunately the job market is influenced by "technology apostels", so we moved our teams from VB.NET to C#, not because we didn't enjoy programming in it or were less successful doing so, but solely for the reason that the mainstream in the profession has chosen C# or C++ as their preferred language. As business software developer I have an obligation to my employer to do my job the most efficient way possible and that includes being able to share and absorb knowledge of the professional community via Google etc. We have watched the contributions from people providing samples and articles in VB.NET down close to nil during the last few years. At the same time hard and software providers that we utilize when we integrate with new technology, especially in the industrial production sector, have stopped providing any API descriptions and samples for anything but C#. On top of that fact, I want my staff to be able to find a job if out of whatever reason they have to leave our company in these uncertain economical times. So we made this decision based on facts and our circumstances. In our case it revitalized the development team quite a bit, because we were able to utilize the opportunity to get staff certified as a team effort. That was a lot of fun. So my statement would be: If you can only write code in one specific language and you religiously fight exposing yourself to other avenues, you are definitely not a IT professional, you are rather a one trick pony and quite ignorant on top of it.