VB vs C# debate...

Rocky shared his thoughts on this. Personally I use C# as my primary development language, but I thought this statement by Rocky made a lot of sense:

"Second, Basic was designed specifically to cater to the way people think. C-style languages were designed specifically to cater to the way machines work."

Good stuff! I'll be borrowing that statement for future debates :)

(snowing here in Dallas -- it was 80 degress not 4 days ago)

Published Wednesday, December 07, 2005 11:19 AM by Rob Howard

Comments

# re: VB vs C# debate...

Wednesday, December 07, 2005 1:01 PM by Wim Hollebrandse
Though I totally agree with the sentiment that VB.NET is as well suited to build .NET enterprise apps (be it winforms/smart clients or ASP.NET) as C#, I also am pretty sure that a lot of hobbyist kind of users (or .NET beginners) start out using VB.NET instead of C# (probably because it seems less intimidating to them - unfair I know, but true).

Also, a lot of VB5/6 coders make the jump to VB.NET, which is not as seamless as they may think. Especially from an OOD/OOP point of view. Most people using C#, have some affinity with C/C++ -style languages and are more likely to have a better grasp of OOD/OOP than the average VB.NET developer.

Again, this is unfair to the many good VB.NET developers out there, but I have seen this happen on many occasions.

# re: VB vs C# debate...

Wednesday, December 07, 2005 2:44 PM by Frans Bouma
VB, the language with the wonderful construct: On Error Resume Next

Indeed, how humans think! ;) :D </joke>

I loved Rocky's article, it's a great read and a good laugh! :). What scares me a bit is the thought of how many people will take his first paragraphs seriously....

# re: VB vs C# debate...

Wednesday, December 07, 2005 3:56 PM by Jeff Gonzalez
I think Don Box said it best...

"Of course you can use the semi colon in VB.NET, just be sure to use the semi-colon-prefix-indicator"

Dim x As Int32 = 5 ';

# re: VB vs C# debate...

Wednesday, December 07, 2005 3:59 PM by Rob Howard
> use the semi-colon-prefix-indicator"

That's funny :)

# re: VB vs C# debate...

Thursday, December 08, 2005 9:30 AM by Tim Murphy
I know that Rocky was trying to put some humor in the subject, but this is one statement that I really don't agree with.

VB is like saying "The four legged short animal with red hair that is part of the canine family" where as c-type languages would just say "The fox". Too many redundant modifiers.

And why does everyone always pick on semi colons. VB has always had the line continuation symbol. It is just as annoying. They were both put there to address the same issue.

I've spent more years writing VB and VB.NET than I have C++/C# because clients have forced me to. Most of that time I spent teaching so called VB programmers how to do their jobs. Just because there are more people writing it, doesn't mean they have a clue what they are doing.

Don't get me wrong. VB isn't a bad language. I just prefer C-type languages. To each their own. Now can I we move onto a topic that actually helps us get our work done?

# re: VB vs C# debate...

Friday, December 09, 2005 3:40 PM by Walt Lounsbery
Have people already forgotten that BASIC was invented at Dartmouth, specifically to teach liberal arts students how to code?

Dallas had way too many accidents yesterday given the amount of ice left from the "storm." We know non-Southerners don't understand our aversion to the roads in such trivial weather, even though a car totalled by some yahoo in these conditions is still bad.

But back to that language debate. Can't all us .NET Framework users just get along?