Where Is C# Heading?

A friend of mine (let’s call him Morpheus to conceal his identity) and I had a lovely chat about this helpful linkfest on immutability in C# (great posts there, btw!).

Morpheus: yeah it is the F# folks moving some of its concepts to C# 
Me: Yeah, I noticed. Good stuff. 
Me: Wonder what a hodge-podge C# will become soon :D 
Morpheus: just like VB 
Me: Aaaah, who cares about VB :D 
Me: People will still name classes clsXxxxxx :D 
Morpheus: well, if C# gets as convoluted (sp) as VB, then 
what's the difference? 

(Morpheus wins this round)

I will leave it up to you to come up with a good answer.

Let me guess: you also think Blu-Ray should win and that HD-DVD is a piece of junk. Same exact mentality as the C# folks who ignorantly trash VB.

I guess you only accept comments from people who agree with you. Grow up.

Sorry, thought you deleted my comment. You can delete these two.

Oh no, dissenting comments are very welcome! ;) Otherwise, what's the point of preaching to the choir?

OK, glad to hear! I promise not to post anything in your comments like the IEBlog gets however.... ;-)

Who cares about VB? I do! And so do thousands of other faithful programmers. I figured you to be above the bullshit C# vs. VB fallacy, that some would call a debate.

Anyways, what's the answer? There is no difference, becuase I think C# already is as "convoluted" as VB. Although I don't think that VB is convoluted at all.

Boooooooooo!

That's for you and Morpheus!

string cSharp = "Stale";

Dim vbNet as String
vbNet = "Inspired"

Sometimes you have to be willing to get a little messy in order to craft a work of art!

--chaz

LOL! I get a kick out of comments so far because the chat had a humorous tone (see smilies there?) and I'm still waiting for a humorous "good answer."

Yes, Morpheus was me ;)

LOL! The identity has been leaked. You know what happened to Scooter Libby, eh? :)

For folks that don't get it, the whole conversation was done in a kidding manner. There are some stuff in VB 9 that I just plain love, but backward compatibility to VB 6 can make it seem convoluted. Now that C# has been around for a while, it is starting to suffer from some cruft. Combine that with the fact that the VB team seems to have found some new inspiration, and I’ve got to say, VB is starting to look like innovators, instead of the also rans that plague the language since the start of .Net (at least to me).

Mac and VB fan boys seem to share gene or two: "Must defend my precious, must defend my precious, must …” ;-)

@C-J: Pardon my directness, but that's just NUTS to compare VB people to Mac fan boys.

First off, there is nothing even close to a concept of "fan boy" to a person who feels that VB is a terrific language to program web sites and applications. If anything, C# fanatics share a closer gene pool, because many of them take the attitude of "all else sucks, except for C#."

That's the same kind of intolerance that the Mac people have, and it's also the same kind of nuttiness that Firefox firebrands possess.

I can't understand people who feel so threatened by a language or product that they actively advocate against it.

Sounds to me that Don's got the right approach after all: recognize a product's strengths and weaknesses objectively, and not let fanaticism cloud your objectiveness.

I've been a VB programmer since the very first version. Actually, I started programming in regular BASIC when the first Commodore PETs came out in 1980 or thereabouts. So I know a thing or two about the language.

I also know C# pretty well. I learned it when it was simply called "C", and learned C++ and C# when they came out as well.

I don't see anything in C# that makes me feel that it's a better language for building web sites or applications. I simply don't. I've touched just about every aspect of .NET, and so far there is absolutely NOTHING that I've done where I was forced to use C# because VB couldn't handle the task.

Nor do I think there is something I've built where I thought it could be easier in C# or more readable in C#. If anything, I find VB programs to be much easier to read, as the language is nearly self-documenting by its very syntax.

I understand that plenty of people feel the opposite: that C# is much easier and/or easier to read. But you won't see me ripping on these people just because they feel that way. I like to tell people of the virtues of VB programming, but I won't deny the great features of C# too. I can't see how doing that would bring any benefit.

Check out XML literals in VB 9, and tell me if that isn't one of the coolest, most efficient, and self-documenting features in ANY programming language.