Why in the world would someone include the words Visual Basic in the title of a submission to Hacker News? And how in the world does that article get to the front page?
Why c# is OK but VB is not? They both have the same feature set with different syntax. VB, as the language, is more powerful at the moment than Java, for example. Got genetics, lambda, linq for years and now async/await. Java OK, VB not? Come on :)
Genetics, cool!! Accounting for genetic drift must be a bitch though.
Yep, generics, my bad.
Even though I started this whole religious war thread, I don't really want to continue with it (but I'm too proud to delete my comment). Here is my rebuttal in a nutshell; VB is not succinct and therefore not a powerful language[1].
Succinctness is definitely not the sole measure of programming language's power. If it was then APL would have become mainstream. In that case it actually worked against adoption of the language even though it was very capable otherwise.
VB.net isn't terrible. It enabled me to transfer all of my programming knowledge from VB6 into the .NET world, then move on to C# and ultimately other languages. Thank god for VB.net as far as I'm concerned.
Agreed, I can't dis it because it's what introduced me to OOP. That said, I'm glad I haven't had to do any VB for 8 years now. There are a host of other languages (Javascript, Ruby, C#, Erlang, Coffeescript, even C++) I prefer to program with.