4 ms·

It likely takes 3-5 developers just to maintain what they already have until end of life. Whenever people come up with these tiny estimates for how much "effor

It likely takes 3-5 developers just to maintain what they already have until end of life. Whenever people come up with these tiny estimates for how much "effort" things take they ignore the organizational overhead and maintenance costs. For example, when changes are made to the CTS/CLS[0] a lot of time is spent considering how those changes will impact other .Net languages, that's a cost/overhead even without actual work on those languages. So it might take "3-5 people to keep VB.Net alive" but only if you ignore the man-hours lost in other teams (.Net Framework, Tooling, Libraries, etc) and the people already required to maintain existing VB.Net Support (3-5~). 15-20 people is a more realistic conservative estimate. Plus the language's popularity is almost gone: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F01dpgv,VB.net,C%23 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0... [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/common-type-system https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/common-type...

nv-vn 7y ago
With the interest fading so much, I think Microsoft probably just wants to nix the project as something official. While it's not expensive for them to maintain, I imagine they don't want to be tied to a dying product like that. They probably want to actively discourage development of VB because VB does not fit into their vision of the .NET ecosystem anymore. I think that's the point the author is missing here.
phillipcarter 7y ago
The author worked on the team for 8 years, including the transition to Roslyn which unified much of the expensive concerns around VB.NET and C#. It's the author's extremely strong familiarity with that engineering system that led to their claim. In the post he walks through how team sizes grew significantly smaller across the board. 15-20 people would be far larger than the current C# language/compiler team.

nv-vn 7y ago

With the interest fading so much, I think Microsoft probably just wants to nix the project as something official. While it's not expensive for them to maintain, I imagine they don't want to be tied to a dying product like that. They probably want to actively discourage development of VB because VB does not fit into their vision of the .NET ecosystem anymore. I think that's the point the author is missing here.

phillipcarter 7y ago

The author worked on the team for 8 years, including the transition to Roslyn which unified much of the expensive concerns around VB.NET and C#. It's the author's extremely strong familiarity with that engineering system that led to their claim. In the post he walks through how team sizes grew significantly smaller across the board. 15-20 people would be far larger than the current C# language/compiler team.