Thursday, September 04 2008: VB.NET Sucks
I met up with a co-worker who left Initech a couple months ago to work at a full-time web development shop. While he was here, he did ColdFusion work on the corporate website, and ColdFusion was much better than ASP or ASP.NET. Since moving on he has begun to do work in Java and has co-workers using C#. Now Java is the best and C# is better than VB.NET. Of course, Initech is stupid for making a corporate decision to go with VB.NET (in an attempt to leverage the thousands of years of combined experience in VB6 during the move to .NET).
I didn't have the heart to explain to him that C# and VB.NET both compile down to the same bytecode and that they're really just different interfaces to the same underlying language - MSIL. Since the core of the work is done using the .NET Framework's shared object hierarchy and all .NET languages adopted a common set of native types and operators, the only substantive difference between C# and VB.NET is whether you use curly braces or whether you type out "then", "do while", "loop", and "end if". He's right, though, VB.NET sucks.
I didn't have the heart to explain to him that C# and VB.NET both compile down to the same bytecode and that they're really just different interfaces to the same underlying language - MSIL. Since the core of the work is done using the .NET Framework's shared object hierarchy and all .NET languages adopted a common set of native types and operators, the only substantive difference between C# and VB.NET is whether you use curly braces or whether you type out "then", "do while", "loop", and "end if". He's right, though, VB.NET sucks.
