Bravo Anthony D. Green !!! Part I to V : A Fundamental Right to Self-Determination

[aarondglover]

Amazed at how well Anthony has articulated his opinion and argument in these series of posts. Much love to Anthony for taking the time to write this.

His post avoids hyperbole and doesn't seek to vilify any one person or team.

This is a big read - but I implore every single VB Developer and member of the ",NET Team" to read this.

After reading it myself, it is apparent that the absence of such long form writing is a contributing reason as to why so many forum, user-voice and other discussions fall into disarray.

For convenience I have added the links

https://anthonydgreen.net/2020/03/15/a-primer-on-why-the-chronic-suffering-of-the-vb-net-community-is-neither-necessary-nor-a-matter-of-expense-or-practicality/ https://anthonydgreen.net/2020/03/19/part-i-a-fundamental-right-to-self-determination/ https://anthonydgreen.net/2020/03/19/part-ii-a-direct-response/ https://anthonydgreen.net/2020/03/19/part-iii-from-loving-microsoft-to-wanting-microsoft-to-needing-microsoft-to/ https://anthonydgreen.net/2020/03/19/part-iv-visual-basic-net/ https://anthonydgreen.net/2020/03/19/part-v-an-open-letter-to-microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-on-the-matter-of-his-words-and-the-company-he-leads/

[Padanian]

Lovely reading. Well done. If anyone, ADG is the one that mostly deserves to lead the VB community. At this point in time, I'd rather see MS let VB go and donate it to the community.

[Padanian]

Spinning up temporary projects to help other VB users on the Internet. Do you know how many throwaway projects one makes in a day answering questions on VB Facebook groups?

And I thought it was only me with ConsoleApplication238...

[Happypig375]

No use of SharpLab?

[vbcodec]

VB is killed because C# team do not want competition. Mads routinely discredit VB (Build confs, blogs), gafter created false hopes, by creating feature proposals, only to left it in void, without any further explanations, others are just ignorants and usually do not participate here. They deduced that VB users is just 1 milion, while C# users if few milions, so let's forcily try to convert VB-ers to C#, especially combined with NET Core. But it is absolutely proved, that only bad ideas need force to be respected.

[WolvenRA]

If anyone, ADG is the one that mostly deserves to lead the VB community.

Absolutely!!! ADG is exactly the type of person that we need leading VB. ADG with a team of people that feel the same about VB as ADG does.

[WolvenRA]

For everyone that agrees with Anthony Green, get on Twitter (sign up if you have to) and Like and Retweet Anthony's Tweet at Satya Nadella. Let's make this thing trend HUGE!

[Padanian]

Tweeted and retweeted

[VBAndCs]

We need to make a hash tag about VB Say: #I_love_VB_NET (I already started it) and post about it in Facebook and Twitter.

[Happypig375]

@KathleenDollard No comment?

[pricerc]

@KathleenDollard No comment?

I don't believe it's her turn - Anthony's message was directed way above her at Microsoft.

And if you read all of Anthony's posts, you'd know that Kathleen isn't the problem.

[Happypig375]

@pricerc I just find it weird that there are comments in all other threads yet there is not even a sign of agreement here.

[zspitz]

@Happypig375

• However much Kathleen stresses otherwise, whatever she says is liable to be misrepresented as an official Microsoft response, with all the consequences thereof.
• I imagine she weighs much of what she might say here in the light of "How can this advance Visual Basic?", and very little fits that criteria.
• To the community, Microsoft is perhaps perceived in the main as a monolithic institution of faceless components (much as I imagine within Microsoft there might be a perception of the vocal VB community as a bunch of whiny idiots who can't be bothered to fork the compiler); but perhaps to Kathleen, Microsoft is a group of co-workers, colleagues and friends, both up and down the management chain. Under these circumstances and in a politically charged environment, it's very hard to say anything political without someone either from Microsoft or the community getting hurt.

[ericmutta]

Reading through the articles and I just had to share this from part 4:

Visual Basic .NET is a world-class language with such maturity in the infrastructure of the language. Just the overload resolution and type inference alone are worth years of development time. A modern compiler architecture along with an extensible set of platform APIs—Roslyn—built by the most brilliant minds in the industry that cost millions of dollars and 5 years to develop. The parser in VB is designed in such a way that makes certain experiences and features that would be prohibitively costly even in C# relatively trivial in VB. And it’s all open source! VB has a slick IDE, a great debugging experience. These are assets other non-Microsoft languages (and a few academics) would kill to have, other non-Microsoft languages are investing heavily to achieve, and VB already has them.

The part about VB's overload resolution and type inference is spot on. I remember many many times writing code involving lambdas, generics and overloaded functions, and I was thinking to myself the kitchen is going to blow up or something when the compiler tries to compile this...and to this day the kitchen hasn't blown up: the code always just works. Simply brilliant stuff :rocket:

[Padanian]

https://github.com/dotnet/vblang/pull/385 is a clear example of what Anthony was describing so well: committing an addition of a single "s" in an URL, requested on March 2019, is now completed 13 months after the bug submission.