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Letters to the Editor

August 15, 2005

Letters to Visual Studio Magazine are welcome. Letters must include your name, address, and daytime phone number to be considered for publication. Letters might be edited for form, fit, and style. Please send them to Letters to the Editor, c/o Visual Studio Magazine, 2600 El Camino Real, Suite 300, San Mateo, CA 94403; fax them to 650-570-6307; or e-mail them to .

.NET Provides Choice, Options
Being certified in both VB.NET and C#, I don't understand this ongoing debate [Editor's Note, "Is C# the Only Language That Matters?" by Patrick Meader, August 2005]. If one knows the .NET base class library, the actual difference in languages boils down to whether or not you like semicolons.

Coming from a background in Web development, learning VB.NET was easy because of prior VBScript knowledge, and transferring that knowledge to C# was easy due to a background in Java and JavaScript.

Any serious developer in the .NET platform should be bilingual. It requires little extra effort and pays off over the long haul by enabling work for either type of shop. It also relieves the constant stress put upon us by the VB vs. C# debates.

Bill Sarris, Pebble Beach, Calif.

I have watched the language debate since before VB was a twinkle in anyone's eye. Being fluent in a broad range of languages from C++ down to JavaScript, and having used them all commercially at one time or another, I found the major shift with .NET was not that it made languages equal, but that it provided options. Any coder who knows multiple languages knows that sometimes, maybe even just because it feels right, certain languages seem right for certain tasks. With .NET, we have been offered a way to engage in multilinguistic coding without sacrificing interoperability. In my case, lately, most of my library functions end up coded in C#, while many of the user interfaces and connective code is in VB.NET.

I think where we are going wrong is in making this a debate at all, because it has religious overtones that have no benefit to our industry. The right choice is the right choice because it gets the job done, and because in doing so we drive better business opportunities. But by continuing to declare any language superior, we provide excuses for business managers who do not necessarily know anything about coding. We need to quit distracting them and ourselves and accept that there is no perfect language for every task, and no perfect reason for any language choice.