Hey, community.
This one might probably trigger some of you. But just a question that comes out of the blue: What are your thoughts on it?
I first learned programming back in the day with Visual Basic 2008. Nowadays, I can program with C#, Java, PHP and some other languages rather well (I’m no professional, though), but I often come back to Visual Basic, because I’m just so used to it. Even though it’s not that often, because I’m a Linux user.
But let’s say I need a small program for Windows real quick? VB.NET is gonna be my choice. Right now, I’m implementing a board game server + client for the game of go (also called baduk or wei’qi) and I’m making really good progress.
I personally think that people should just use what they want to use. I don’t get the hate for PHP and some other languages and I think this gate-keeping and god complex some developers have is really annoying. Makes me want to use VB.NET even harder.
I also don’t like to jump on board with every new and upcoming programming language or library, just to be cool.
I’d also like to emphasize that I’m not creating software for a living right now. I do have a small company for a little bit of freelance work, but that’s just money on the side that comes in by creating really small projects.
With
Option Strict Onand other reasonable accommodations, VB .Net isn’t really any worse than C#—just kind of sloppy and verbose. I’ve coded in worse. (And I think Mono supports it now, so you might be able to use it under Linux, too.)VB 6 / VB for Applications, on the other hand, is beyond awful and should probably be formally exorcised.
On Error Resume Nextis clearly the work of some malevolent supernatural being.(As for PHP, it draws a lot of flak because of things like the lack of a naming convention in its early days—it used to be that you couldn’t predict whether a function in the standard libraries was going to be named in snake_case or justsmashedtogether. It’s been more than 10 years since I last worked with the language, so I hope they’ve fixed that.)
FYI Mono is essentially dead now or at least no longer necessary as .NET 6 is open source and cross platform, so you can just use regular .NET on Linux now.
Eh, you can tell I haven’t spent much time worrying about .Net support on Linux for a while—there’s always some other language or system that I consider a better fit for the job. (In other words, I sit corrected, because standing would be too much effort.)
The bulk of my day to day work is with a legacy application written in vb.net, and I couldn’t agree more with your first paragraph.