I probably could have been more clear, but by "power" I was talking about the abstractions afforded by the language. C# also exposes more CLR features than F#,

I probably could have been more clear, but by "power" I was talking about the abstractions afforded by the language. C# also exposes more CLR features than F#, yet it usually clear and uncontroversial when someone says that F# is more powerful than C#; I've never heard people talk about power in terms of performance. But, it's not like C# ever afforded a strict superset of CLR features: until recently, VB exposed exception filters while C# did not, and that is arguably a more important feature in day-to-day programming than pointers and unsigned integers. I also forgot to mention that VB's lambda expressions are more powerful because they can contain iterators. Now, don't misunderstand me: I love, love, love C#. After grokking Haskell's type classes (and Scala's traits), I even slightly prefer C# over F# since the former can more easily simulate those features. But, lets not pretend that VB didn't ever having any significant advantages over C# for day-to-day programming. Even today, VB is probably a nicer environment for Ruby and Python programmers than C#.