5 ms·

Looking at the post RTM plan, and I really hope they will de-prioritize VB work and push F# more! It has so big potential to attract wider community and bring b

by hudo 11y ago

Looking at the post RTM plan, and I really hope they will de-prioritize VB work and push F# more! It has so big potential to attract wider community and bring back some good OSS devs. Except few big companies that needs to maintain legacy apps, nobody really cares about VB any more, specially in some brand new dev stack like asp.net core. Waste of time and resources IMHO. I was a VB dev, and it really made sense 20y ago. Now, I haven't heard somebody is using VB (excluding some bank maybe - but they're mostly stuck in .net 2 or 3).

insulanian 11y ago
Definitely this! I can't remember talking to anyone using VB in last 5 years. And I'm LOB / enterprise app dev.
- graycat 11y ago
  Can't say that anymore -- I'm using VB .NET. See my post a sibling of yours here.
  - cm2187 11y ago
    And now two VB.Net developers! Though granted I work in the financial sector...
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Couple of really nice things about F#: - It's multi-paradigm. If you just gotta have classes? Go make some. But if you want to learn and take your game to the next level, you'll soon ditch a lot of them. F# means you can move from OO to (mostly) pure FP without having to change languages or stacks. - You can plug in stuff made in all the other .NET languages. There's a ton of stuff out there that you can just pick up and use. I like F# because the more I use it, the better I get. I know I don't want classes, for loops, mutable state, and the rest -- but sometimes I just can't see how to get around them. So I throw them in there, get the code to work. Then I go back and figure out where I went wrong. Those "going back" moments are like miniature programming lessons tailored just for the things I don't understand well. Very cool.
- graycat 11y ago
  > But if you want to learn and take your game to the next level, you'll soon ditch a lot of them. "Next level"? Sorry, I don't believe it. All I see is more programming style, and that is no more significant for something better than some new Paris designer dress style. Functional programming style? Not interested. Showing that P = NP? Sure, interested!
  - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
    Perhaps I didn't state that well. I'll try again. I know what good OO looks like. I can apply SOLID and a lot of other techniques to make my class graph "correct". When I'm done, I have a well-decomposed mostly-isomorphic view of the problem domain (usually along with a lot of "helper" stuff thrown in.) If you know how good OO looks, and you look at your classes and they don't look that way? You can learn a lot by continuing to clean them up. Same goes for FP. But currying, partial application, and composition allows for a huge amount of code reduction (and corresponding better problem understanding) than OO. So as you "clean up" your functional code, you're learning much better refactoring skills than you ever would with OO. It's not surprising. OO is mainly concerned with where things go. Learn you some OO and you know where to put stuff. FP is mainly concerned with what things do. Learn you some FP and you'll learn how to make the computer do more with less code. Less code generally means less bugs and easier maintenance, but we can save that for another day. The point of my original post is that F# can let you learn both ways -- and move from OO to FP in an incremental, self-directed fashion. That's pretty cool.
  - lsadam0 11y ago
    I'm not seeing your point. Your posts I have read thus far are arguing for a specific programming style....but you dismiss all other programming styles. Your style is just another 'paris designer dress'. Objectively, certain styles have distinct advantages over others. Your argument comes across as "Broadband? Why would I need broadband? I have a perfectly fine dial-up modem!". I'm trying to say this as nice as possible: You come across as a person who is against learning any new concepts. As if you learned one thing many years ago and refuse to change.
graycat 11y ago
> Except few big companies that needs to maintain legacy apps, nobody really cares about VB any more, specially in some brand new dev stack like asp.net core. Waste of time and resources IMHO. I was a VB dev, and it really made sense 20y ago. Now, I haven't heard somebody is using VB (excluding some bank maybe - but they're mostly stuck in .net 2 or 3). Nope. Not even close. My startup is based on Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Framework 4.0 with ASP.NET and ADO.NET, and IIS. My startup has all new code -- I wrote it all. Currently the code has 18,000 programming language statements in 80,000 lines of typing -- right, lots of comments. No, my startup is not a bank. Instead, my work is for a new Web site where the crucial, core secret sauce is from some original work I did in applied math with some advanced prerequisites in pure/applied math. I really like VB .NET, a lot. I've used a lot of programming languages, and VB .NET is my favorite, by a nice margin. Microsoft did well. C#? No thanks. It borrows some of the syntax from C, and it was designed to be sparse, for the old 8 KB main memory DEC PDP-8, with a deliberately idiosyncratic syntax that is tricky, difficult to read, write, or understand and error prone. It's just too darned sparse. AFAIK, VB .NET and C# are really essentially the same except just for syntactic sugar. IIRC there is a translator from one of these two to the other. Maybe there are some differences, but they have to be for tricky things I likely don't need and don't want to use. So, since VB .NET is much easier to read, write, teach, learn, debug and is less error prone, it's VB .NET instead of C# for my startup. If Microsoft drops, VB .NET, I will scream bloody murder. For functional programming, no thanks. I explained my programming style in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10937342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10937342 Really, I have no interest in more revolutions in programming style. Instead, I want good tools, and IMHO VB .NET is the best there is. Then I want just to use the good tools. For a tool better than VB .NET, that would be a long shot for a long time. Microsoft: For VB .NET, the .NET Framework, etc. don't mess them up, grow them no more than slowly, keep strict upward compatibility -- don't force me to rewrite or even retest my existing production code. If some users like C# or F#, fine with me -- I won't be using either of them, or A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, ... or G# either except on my piano.
enricosada 11y ago
it's possible (really) to help with F# support, no need to wait ms. That said, vb is same as F#, every language it's ok in some context. The whole dotnetcli/coreclr/aspnet is a new bootstrap, so it's ok only one language it's supported at the beginning. Discussing now of other languages help make it language agnostic. The dotnet cli and aspnet team are really friendly if someone want to help.

by hudo 11y ago

insulanian 11y ago

Definitely this! I can't remember talking to anyone using VB in last 5 years. And I'm LOB / enterprise app dev.

graycat 11y ago
Can't say that anymore -- I'm using VB .NET. See my post a sibling of yours here.
- cm2187 11y ago
  And now two VB.Net developers! Though granted I work in the financial sector...

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

Couple of really nice things about F#: - It's multi-paradigm. If you just gotta have classes? Go make some. But if you want to learn and take your game to the next level, you'll soon ditch a lot of them. F# means you can move from OO to (mostly) pure FP without having to change languages or stacks. - You can plug in stuff made in all the other .NET languages. There's a ton of stuff out there that you can just pick up and use. I like F# because the more I use it, the better I get. I know I don't want classes, for loops, mutable state, and the rest -- but sometimes I just can't see how to get around them. So I throw them in there, get the code to work. Then I go back and figure out where I went wrong. Those "going back" moments are like miniature programming lessons tailored just for the things I don't understand well. Very cool.

graycat 11y ago
> But if you want to learn and take your game to the next level, you'll soon ditch a lot of them. "Next level"? Sorry, I don't believe it. All I see is more programming style, and that is no more significant for something better than some new Paris designer dress style. Functional programming style? Not interested. Showing that P = NP? Sure, interested!
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  Perhaps I didn't state that well. I'll try again. I know what good OO looks like. I can apply SOLID and a lot of other techniques to make my class graph "correct". When I'm done, I have a well-decomposed mostly-isomorphic view of the problem domain (usually along with a lot of "helper" stuff thrown in.) If you know how good OO looks, and you look at your classes and they don't look that way? You can learn a lot by continuing to clean them up. Same goes for FP. But currying, partial application, and composition allows for a huge amount of code reduction (and corresponding better problem understanding) than OO. So as you "clean up" your functional code, you're learning much better refactoring skills than you ever would with OO. It's not surprising. OO is mainly concerned with where things go. Learn you some OO and you know where to put stuff. FP is mainly concerned with what things do. Learn you some FP and you'll learn how to make the computer do more with less code. Less code generally means less bugs and easier maintenance, but we can save that for another day. The point of my original post is that F# can let you learn both ways -- and move from OO to FP in an incremental, self-directed fashion. That's pretty cool.
- lsadam0 11y ago
  I'm not seeing your point. Your posts I have read thus far are arguing for a specific programming style....but you dismiss all other programming styles. Your style is just another 'paris designer dress'. Objectively, certain styles have distinct advantages over others. Your argument comes across as "Broadband? Why would I need broadband? I have a perfectly fine dial-up modem!". I'm trying to say this as nice as possible: You come across as a person who is against learning any new concepts. As if you learned one thing many years ago and refuse to change.

graycat 11y ago

> Except few big companies that needs to maintain legacy apps, nobody really cares about VB any more, specially in some brand new dev stack like asp.net core. Waste of time and resources IMHO. I was a VB dev, and it really made sense 20y ago. Now, I haven't heard somebody is using VB (excluding some bank maybe - but they're mostly stuck in .net 2 or 3). Nope. Not even close. My startup is based on Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Framework 4.0 with ASP.NET and ADO.NET, and IIS. My startup has all new code -- I wrote it all. Currently the code has 18,000 programming language statements in 80,000 lines of typing -- right, lots of comments. No, my startup is not a bank. Instead, my work is for a new Web site where the crucial, core secret sauce is from some original work I did in applied math with some advanced prerequisites in pure/applied math. I really like VB .NET, a lot. I've used a lot of programming languages, and VB .NET is my favorite, by a nice margin. Microsoft did well. C#? No thanks. It borrows some of the syntax from C, and it was designed to be sparse, for the old 8 KB main memory DEC PDP-8, with a deliberately idiosyncratic syntax that is tricky, difficult to read, write, or understand and error prone. It's just too darned sparse. AFAIK, VB .NET and C# are really essentially the same except just for syntactic sugar. IIRC there is a translator from one of these two to the other. Maybe there are some differences, but they have to be for tricky things I likely don't need and don't want to use. So, since VB .NET is much easier to read, write, teach, learn, debug and is less error prone, it's VB .NET instead of C# for my startup. If Microsoft drops, VB .NET, I will scream bloody murder. For functional programming, no thanks. I explained my programming style in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10937342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10937342 Really, I have no interest in more revolutions in programming style. Instead, I want good tools, and IMHO VB .NET is the best there is. Then I want just to use the good tools. For a tool better than VB .NET, that would be a long shot for a long time. Microsoft: For VB .NET, the .NET Framework, etc. don't mess them up, grow them no more than slowly, keep strict upward compatibility -- don't force me to rewrite or even retest my existing production code. If some users like C# or F#, fine with me -- I won't be using either of them, or A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, ... or G# either except on my piano.

enricosada 11y ago

it's possible (really) to help with F# support, no need to wait ms. That said, vb is same as F#, every language it's ok in some context. The whole dotnetcli/coreclr/aspnet is a new bootstrap, so it's ok only one language it's supported at the beginning. Discussing now of other languages help make it language agnostic. The dotnet cli and aspnet team are really friendly if someone want to help.