Hacker News Reader

Comment by shanselman | Hacker News Reader

Totally agree on F#. I'm 100% paying attention to C#, VB, and F# and making sure everyone kicks butt.

Totally honest question: in the world of Javascript, Python, Ruby, etc. is Visual Basic still relevant? I understand the desire to have it around to drag VB devs to .NET, but is there a market anymore? Wouldn't it be better to just throw it overboard and focus on C# / F# and maybe Typescript as a JS superset?

There's a lot of customer demand for VB.NET support:

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...

https://github.com/aspnet/Home/issues/236

http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/04/VB-Core

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/introducing-asp-net-5#after-c...

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/22697...

There's one pretty cool feature that VB.Net has that C#/F# don't and that's an XML literal syntax... I wrote a service interface to a Flex client a few years ago (also having an XML literal syntax) and it was pretty nice going. Of course E4X didn't take hold and the syntax didn't make it into C#, but it was nice at the time.

These days I'd lean towards JSON.Net before anything XML based if I can avoid it. WCF could use a little love too.

Pretty much.

For example, we have a customer in health care area, where many of their researchers are using VB.NET for prototyping.

The type of stuff people on HN would use Python or R for, they use VB.NET.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com