The Mint

My new company is your typical enterprise business. They had an in-house application created with Microsoft Access. As the company grew the Access app couldn’t keep up and the need to rewrite the software became obvious. After some false starts in Access they finally settled on VB.NET as the new language of choice. All this occurred a few years prior to my arrival.

Today we are primarily a VB.NET shop. All the developers — myself included — are VB guys with the exception of one. He rants about the “ugliness” of Visual Basic (.NET or otherwise) and how C# is “beautiful” and superior. There is an underlying hint that “real” programmers do not use VB.NET. I find this notion insulting.

Granted I have never given C# a fair chance but I have never had any reason either. I’ve yet to come across a challenge I can’t solve just fine using VB.NET. I’ve been working with Visual Basic since 3.0 and I have been perfectly content until today. 

It turns out he is not alone in his hasty judgement of a developer’s professionalism and skill based solely on the tools they use. A quick trip down Google reveals a wide prejudice toward Visual Basic programmers. And the feeling precedes .NET with plenty of Java/C++ programmers casting Visual Basic users as glorified hobbyist.

I am offended and rightly so but rather than go on the defensive and return the name calling I’ve decided to hop the fence to see what all the fuss is about. Obviously I can’t make use of C# at work but I’ll be tinkering with it in the wee hours of the night. I’ll try to approach this experiment with an open mind but I have to admit I do find all those curly braces to be ugly clutter. At the very least I hope by using C# I’ll find things that suck which I can use as ammo the next time I find myself in a language war with a C# snob.