Sunday, March 11, 2007

Is saying that C# is 'better' than VB.NET is a mauvais ton?




One of my favourite childhood books was book of a semi-forgotten today Russian author - L. Kassil. Misfortunately he didn't stand in competition with McDonald's of today literature world a'la Harry Potter.

Now, you would ask - how it relates to the C#? - Here is the story: heroes of the book were arguing who's stronger - marine or soldier? Whale or an elephant? … - well, you got an idea.

Now an interesting article in SDK Dev' Team blog paradoxically resembled me all of it - marine, soldier and whale :)

In this article SDK developers present a coverage of various themes done for C# and VB.NET in Vista SDK samples:

.NET 3.0 Samples # of Unique C# Coverage VB Coverage
WCF 146 100% 72%
WF 60 100% 95%
WPF 434 98% 58%
Cross Technology 23 96% 9%
.NET Framework 2.0 138 95% 80%
Totals 801 98% 66%

Do you notice that C# coverage is a bit better?

That's why I going to stand on the mauvais ton side and say that C# is better than VB.NET.
Yes, yes, everything could be implemented in language constructions of both languages. But:
1) There is more important development in C# than in VB.NET (e.g. Enterprise Libraries).
2) I think that for historical reasons - most of the people writing in VB.NET are peoples who did a transaction from some sort of visual basic development. And VB projects in the pre .net era were kind of less 'hardcore' than, say, C++ projects, whose developers probably evolved into the C# rather than into the VB.NET.
Except, how else you may explain that market offers higher wages for C# pplz (than to VB.NET)?

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