The Blah-Blah Blog: Microsoft MVPs revolt: “By killing off classic VB, Microsoft abandoned millions of developers (some 18 million, of which an estimated 6 million are professionals) who invested countless man-years building, debugging, and perfecting tens of millions of Visual Basic apps.”
It's perfectly understandable why VB developers are up in arms against Microsoft's .NET strategy. VB.NET is not Visual Basic. It's just C# without the curly braces. Once again, I will resort to quoting Joel Spolsky on this matter (“argumentum ad autoritatem” I can hear somebody complaining, but what the heck):
Which makes me wonder a bit about .NET's cross-language strategy. The idea is, choose any language you want, there are zillions, and they all work the same way.
VB.NET and C#.NET are virtually identical except for tiny syntactic differences. And other languages that want to be part of the .NET world need to support at least a core set of features and types or they won't be able to Play Well With Others. But how do I develop a UNIX command line utility in .NET? How do I develop a tiny Windows EXE in less than 16K in .NET?
It seems like .NET gives us a “choice” of languages precisely where we couldn't care less about it — in the syntax.
(Via Scoble.)
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