There has been a long-standing question by many about "what should I use?"
I can't tell you how many times I get asked this question, or see it come up
in forums.
With .NET, MS tossed a lot of technology at people in one big bundle, and
people are confused, probably because historically, a technology is a
single-purpose gizmo used to solve a particular problem a certain way.
People keep hanging on to that paradigm. In fact, I had an Indian chap email
me because he was confused about C#/VB vs ASP.NET, not realizing that
ASP.NET used the same VB/C#.
Anyway, all these questions have led a lot of people to speculate answers
about why you should use one versus another. I've even seen articles appear
in VSM and MSDN on the topic. "Language Divergence" is the new buzzterm.
Trying to categroize the different coding technologies. Unfortunately, this
"argument" totally obscures and undermines the very foundation of the COMMON
Language Infrastructure. In the next version of VS, it's blatantly apparent
that both languages are actually CONVERGING more rather than diverging. VB
gets native unsigned data types and operator overloads, for example
(becoming more like C#). Both languages benefit from generics. C# gets
easier constructs for event handling (becoming more like VB). These are just
scratching the surface.
If anything, both languages have been largely capable of doing the SAME
things, and this is even MORE true in the next edition.
If anything is different between the two, it's the phylosophy of the
languages themselves. VB is a forgiving language, which ALLOWS looser
interpretation of code, while C# absolutely mandates strict interpretation
of code. I emphesized ALLOWS, because with Option Strict ON, and good
programmers who are capable of sticking to standards, VB code can be just as
strictly cast in stone as C# code. In reality, this isn't much of a
difference from the capabilities perspective.
In addition, VB leans towards providing large amounts of helper utilities,
both graphical/IDE and in runtime library functions, while in C#, the trend
is towards pure management of code with a no-frills approach. An ongoing
example is VB's IsNumeric and IsDate utility functions. C# doesn't have
these functions in its language library, but through sheer coding, the same
results can be achieved. This gap widens a bit in the next version of VS.
For example, VB gets the "My" object tree (which gives you a ton of the most
commonly used features of the framework without having to dig into the
framework, and provides some ready-made utilities - like a built-in "ping"
utility), while C# depends more heavily on the code-refactoring engine to
help manage larger amounts of code.
However, in neither of these cases does the capabilities of either language
come into question. They have equal access to the Framework, and are equally
suited to do either "systems" or "application" work. This whole language
divergence arguement is a dumb argument to begin with, and the language
superiority war is a bunch of bullshit built primarily on developer biases
and preferences. You know what they say about people and their opinions...
-Rob Teixeira [MVP]
