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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

VB is dead. Get over it. It was a concession to an army of classic VB devs to not risk losing them to other technology when .NET and C# were born.

Since then, every VB develooper has had two decades to realize that VB.NET never was a "new VB", but just a C# dialect. It offers zero value over C#, and it's so closely related that anyone who knows VB.NET can pick up C# instead in literally no time at all.

I don't see why the author brings up F#. F# is just as much a second class citizen in the .NET world, but it is a project of a great community and of ms research.

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> It offers zero value over C#

I loved VB .NET XML literals. Less relevant today with JSON all the things, but I did choose VB .NET a few times over C# just because of these guys. Made for amazingly readable (to me) XML wrangling code.

Used to occasionally import VB libraries into C# for that sort of thing. :-)

A little known secret is that in the VB namespace in .NET full fat, there is a really nice CSV file reader/writer.

https://coding.abel.nu/2012/06/built-in-net-csv-parser/

My colleague showed me this a couple weeks ago, which makes me laugh even more when I think back to all the CSV parsers I saw in VB.NET in past gigs.

I'll admit, I'd written more than one in C# myself before I discovered FileHelpers.

I think I've written some CSV parsers until I thought to myself "I can't believe they don't have this in .NET".

For better or worse, VB is still very much alive as an embedded language inside Office. It hasn't been enhanced in years but it probably won't be removed any time soon.

is VBA the same as VB.Net? I thought there were differences?

It's almost completely different. There is only some superficial similarity in syntax.

VBA is a dialect that sits roughly between VBScript and VB6, both defunct technologies.

VBA syntax and standard library is nearly identical to VB6.

F# is an interesting case. It's a second class citizen but it's also the testing ground for a lot of features that end up in c#

In general, many of the "new" features introduced in the past years, both in C# and in many other languages, simply come from the world of functional programming. So yes, F# in the natural playground for these new features simply because it's functional first.

Also, in many other ways is an incredibly powerful language, which leverage in a vry powerful ecosystem, sadly is kinda left behind without big sponsors.

You're not wrong. I need to put more time in with F#. It feels so elegant when I use it, I just have a bad habit of defaulting back to C# when writing .NET code as that's what I know best.

that's F#s problem. C# is a good language, and while F# has some great things ( discriminated unions, computational expressions, pipline) that make for better ways to create software..... they aren't so much better that it justifies the learning curve to get good at F# compared to just writing things in C# ( unless of course you are a F# programmer and then you can't live without all your toys... ). Also, good luck hiring F# devs. My own experience at my company, I did a bunch of things in F#, but upskilling people just proved too much of a side track that I ended up rewriting all the F# in C#, and it was actually amazingly quick to rewrite in C# ( I didn't like the C# as much, but it's fine).

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