C# culture and VB culture – from the “source”

Now we all know that that currently, the differences between C# and VB are only syntactical. If you need to make a choice, then, the decision is mostly “cultural”, plus a bet on the future.

Yes, the future. On M$ platform, the future is determined by M$. You may say, we developers also have a say. Right, that is true, just remember that that “say” must go through M$’s marketing department.

So, we need to take a look of the cultural differences directly from the “source”.
In this blog, I provided a link, and some excerpts. For details, please follow the link; or, better, google “C# creator”, “C# team” etc.

The excerpts are self-explanatory. When I have time, I will try to find what is the “culture” in the VB.net team? How do they innovate: researching, polling, “brain-storming”, “surveying”?

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http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,2180,1837434,00.asp

--------excerpts from the above link:

Question: In regards to Visual Studio, do you see all the languages that are supported now evolving in parity? Will you continue to do to Visual Basic everything you do to C#?

Anders Hejlsberg: …. I do think there are some differences in the profiles of VB (Visual Basic) programmers and the kinds of characteristics they're interested in, and C# programmers, who are probably a little bit more interested in the bleeding edge of language technologies.

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Question: I've been interested in some of the various Microsoft Research projects around the various "Sharps," like X#, F#, Spec#. Are things that Microsoft is learning in those projects going to change what you're doing? How?

Anders Hejlsberg: …. Generics started out as a research project done by Don Syme and Andrew Kennedy at Microsoft Research in Cambridge (UK). These two researchers effectively took the C# language and the .Net platform and added parameterization of types on top of it. They modified it. They wrote two papers about it and gained some experience with it.

… It was, to me, a wonderful example of technology transfer from research into a product. I think Don and Andrew are great researchers and very pragmatic engineers. That's a great combination. I wish there were more like that.

… Don is now working on this thing called F#, which is taking a deeper look at functional programming languages on the .Net platform. And certainly a lot of the stuff we're doing with C#, going forward, will learn from — and is already learning from — functional programming languages.

… So in that sense, I'm an engineer at heart. But I'm keenly interested in research. So, yeah, F# and Spec# is stuff that we look at and evaluate all the time. We meet with the researchers. Our C# design meeting, which is a series of meetings that have now been going on for six years in the same room, in the same time slots, we have researchers come regularly and give presentations on what they're doing and vice versa. Those are all technologies we look at. C-Omega (formerly known as 'Xen' and 'X#') is another one. Some of the members of that research project are actually now members of the C# design team.