Sabot wrote:Fellow GWB member, Chris Williams has posted a very frank critique of what it is to be a VB.Net developer today.
http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2007/10/23/116274.aspx
Why is it that VB is such a maligned language still? It's 100% .Net language these days. Have the C zealots won? Is VB heading for the sunset?
When the trend is now to head towards Dynamic languages, like Ruby with very high levels of abstraction why is VB so villanised when surely this language is the grand-father of this trend?
As a VB.Net Dev myself I can say that I haven't encountered this personally. In fact I get more offers daily than the C# counterparts on my team. Granted I might have a better resume, but if that were the case, I should be getting alot of headhunter calls asking for C# or Java, which I do get, but not as much.
I can't really say it's heading for the sunset at this time, there must be millions of old VB6 applications that run perfectly, but just need a tune up.
In my situation my boss is an old VB6 argonaut, he hired me specifically because I didn't want to language switch on him, which apperantly is a trend these days. If he got a language switch he couldn't run an accurate code review, and would have to be dependant on the C#/Java dev(s). Which basically means if they take a walk, he's up the creek. If I decide to take a walk, he's a bit unhappy, but can still complete the release lifecycle.
That is not to say that the same situation doesn't exist in the C world, I'm sure it does.
I guess what we are seeing is equatable to the "AJAX/Web 2.0" trend of late. Someone hears a buzzword "C#, AJAX, Flash, Silverlight" and they "know" that is what they want, without doing any real research into the subject matter.
Just my two cents though.
