That doesn't make you a serious programmer.

Oh contraire mon Frere. My former boss wrote tons of scripts and apps in VB and VBS. Inconsistent capitalization, no regard for formatting, etc. I consider myself a pro for being able to decifer it all and clean it up.

Also, what a shit language.

@janonb I got a book about Visual Basic for my birthday from a friend. I removed pages that had a mention of algorithms, how to write them on paper and threw it away.

@janonb , sorry to kind of troll but it's "Au contraire mon frère", meaning "On the contrary my brother".
"Oh contraire mon Frere", juste meaning "Oh contrary my brother".

VB is disgusting as heck.

I just spent 3 months adding features on old PureBasic programs. What a nightmare 😵

I agree that VB is not a good language. But VB was my first programming language. I also made my first game in VB when I was 3rd grade. So I am not gonna say too much bad thing about VB. :P

One of my first jobs was this small dev shop that did most of their websites in ASP Classic. (Thankfully I was more involved with the C#/.NET parts of their products) I got out of that shit fast.

@Morgane PureBasic, those were the times...

Macros in MS Excel is how I got started. I got tired of doing the same shit every day, so I started automating the tedious parts. It's a shit language, but it's a gateway drug to real programming.

If this is your reaction to visual basic, i couldn't imagine your reaction to other programming languages. (I never developed in vb)

@jotamontecino Maybe had English keyboard on and au autocorrected to oh?

@NoOne One way of telling the difference, would be looking at what's been accomplished in those languages. Compare the number of cool projects for .NET (e.g. Reactive Extensions) written in C# and VB.

So far, I haven't come across anything of note that's created in VB. I might have missed some project, but it definitely isn't a big language among the "heavy weights" on GitHub.

Of course, when a language is marketed as a simple beginners language for non programmers, then it's not going to attract the pros.

@Grumpy how old is VB? How many projects you can find on github in cobol, pascal, fortran.... ? :)

@jotamontecino I'm just a simple country boy, so please forgive.

@dontbeevil Glad you mentioned older languages, because then we can compare VB to C and C++, which have been around longer than VB. C/C++ projects of note outnumber VB even more than the C# ones do.

@Grumpy do you know the difference between an high level language visual basic (of course now there are better options, included vb.net evolution) and low level language like c/c++ (there are not much better options today) :)

@chasb96 vb.net exist because old people that knows vb can still easily code modern software, most of modern people like me prefer C# of course, but the .Net framework is the same, so you can do the same things with VB.Net or C# (you can even use both in the same solution, if you have some old Dll for example) ... and I would never change at the moment C# for anything else. you cannot compare VB from 1991 with python, it's like compare objective-c in 25 years with swift25 :)

@dontbeevil Glad you mentioned high level languages, because taken age (as in you previous post) into consideration, we can compare with another higher level, managed language off roughly the same age: Java (introduced in 1995, VB was introduced in 1991).

Java projects of note outnumber VB projects by a vast margin too (actually, they also outnumber C# projects).

@Grumpy nice that you decide what's the best just by the numbers, and not by the project, platform, architecture, environment....... Like os x, linux, betamax, hd dvd....... Oh wait :)

@chasb96 if you care about performance, you know about Java performance for example? you have to understand the difference between old VB and VB.Net, the second one has VB syntax, but has the same performance of C# :)

@dontbeevil Sure. VB is best, but no project that's ever made an impact uses it. This is clearly because the C# folks behind ReactiveX, NUnit, Akka.NET, .NET Core etc don't have a clue. Yep, that's how it must be. :-D

A question: how is platform, architecture and environment a factor in the choice C# and VB? Both of them are .NET languages.

@Grumpy we're saying the same things, we didn't understand each other :) (maybe I wasn't clear enough)

platform, architecture and environment is factor in the choice between .NET and other languages, not between VB and C#

I still to this day fail to understan the snobby "omg vb is such a horrible language" specially since it takes me less than 5 minutes translating otherwise complicated c# code into vb.net and vice versa. The guys at .net have done a great job with not letting the language fall behind the other and VB is just so easy to pick up. I really do not get it. Is it because it does not have tons of line noise? Can you not read without symbols (because I can excel at both) sure there are really shitty languages. But VB is not one of them , and reading that is shitty because some noob from {} land could not code in it and decided to make a blog post about it is not a good reason as to why the language is shitty. Nor is its syntax, nor is its speed (trust me)