Why VB.NET is a Bad choice

I posted earlier that I recently changed jobs, which means that I went through a good bit of interviewing trying to find the job I thought was right for me at this point in my career.

Some of you may find it silly, but one of the criteria that was pretty important to me was that all new code was going to be written in C# and not in VB.NET. One of my interviewers asked me why.

VB.NET in its very design tries to solve the wrong problem.

Visual Basic.NET is touted as a nice easy to use language for a novice to learn to make applications. The they learn to make applications in VB.NET and continue to write in VB.NET. This comes to the problem. Writing code is easier than reading code. Go ahead, Google it. VB.NET tries to solve the problem of writing code (the easy part) but makes the hard part harder (reading code).

So you spend 6 months creating that jazzy new VB.NET application that saves the world for you company. How long do you spend maintaining and extending that application? 4 or 5 years? Longer?

VB.NET is different.

In this case, different is not good. Different makes the above problem (writing code is easier than reading code) even more obvious. When you are integrating with other code, reading someone else's code, trying to replicate behavior from some other application in your application; most likely you are reading something totally unlike VB.NET. Hell, even if you are rewriting a legacy application, VB.NET isn't even like Visual Basic 6, so you aren't gaining anything there.

C# on the other hand, shares many structural simularities with C, C++, Java, Javascript and others. Even if you can't write in those languages just because you know C#, you can most likely at least get an idea of what is going on by reading them. C++ looks like Moon Language to a VB.NET developer.

Well, you know what? VB.NET looks like Moon Language to everyone except a VB.NET developer.