This thread is for discussions of Why are we criticizing VB.NET?.

Sorry, I am not through heckling Java and C++. Its not the languages, per se. It is the attitude and the hype that follows them. The best programmers on the planet were C programmers, probably still are. With the hybrid of C/C++, you at least have the option straight C programming. Not everything has to be OOP. Sometimes it has it's advantages, sometimes not. Both compile to the same machine instructions anyhow. And unless you do Assember, you can't get closer to machine code than C.

Java, what a piece of shit. Sun took the C out of C++ and told everyone it was something better. VB can do more with pointers than Java can! It's just hype like the other Albatross around my neck: XML. I moved data between different databases without XML with far more efficiently using delimiters. Now I have to write 100 time more code to parse the same data!

VB.NET? I can't say I know enough about it to judge. It is the latest hype. Better learn it!

I have no fear of change or learning something new. Hell, I never actually learned VB!  I downloaded a demo 6 years ago and began working with it that day. My only fear is that we will all be forced do everything with OOP. That is what sucks about Java. Sometimes I like to do top-down structured programming, sometime I like to create classed. I do not want to be limited.

I appreciate the authors comments about those of still with VB6. Despite the .NET hype, many of us are still killing the critics and blowing away the Java bunch with just VB and the Win32 API! But of course, if you really want to know the API, you better know C.

Good article. Very straight forward!

I say that the article is good, and truly .NET got almost all OO programmer needs.  But there are things VB.NET has failed to do when it comes to OO, and I can say JAVA still has its strong points... (you see Ive learned OO with JAVA).  It failed to get to know when a sub/function should be overriden.  A function/sub in a super class in JAVA can be invoked by just determining the parameters passed, even if it is overriden in its subclass.  Im still exploring VB.NET, perhaps this can be done in its release version.  

For the moment nothing beats JAVA.

Are you seriously considering that Java, as one of the slowest running languages there I have used, is better than VB.NET? I would rather write an app in Assembly than Java (a little extreme but you get the point). The only good thing with Java is that it is platform-independant but its only positive point makes it slow on computers as the Bytecode has to be interpreted while running. I do a lot of VB (6 and .Net) and some C++ and little Java and i can safely sat that at the moment - and for a VERY long time - most things beat Java. Platform-independance isn't form the drop in performance.

Before i converted to VB.NET, I heard all this talk of how they still hadn't improved the OO side of it - constructors still didnt work with arguements etc. - and that it was just an overglorified VB6. Now that I'm using it, I know that it is not true as its OO side is as good as Java because as Java is based on C++, VB.NET is becoming to be based on it also. All the event handlers and action handlers? It seems VB.NET is a few semi-colons and some parentheses away from C++.