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Visual Basic.NET

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I wrote my first complete computer program in 1986. Since then I've programmed (or scripted) in Assembler, BASIC, C, C#, C++, COBOL, F#, HTML, Java, JavaScript, LOGO, Pascal, SQL, VBA and XAML. I don't mind C#. Or Java. The majority of the code I've written in my career was written in C#. And yet my preference remains VB.NET because -

VB.NET supports both static and dynamic typing.
VB.NET is a functional language, supporting local type inference, anonymous functions, monads, and language integrated comonads (even Lisp can be more complex and verbose than VB.NET with LINQ).
VB.NET does project-wide namespace imports. C# doesn't.
VB.NET is no more or less verbose than C#. Haskell and F# however, are indeed a lot less verbose.

There are also readability issues in Java and C# that VB.NET doesn't have (braces, == and =, ! instead of Not, seperate keywords for inheritance and interface implementation, and so on). I learnt Pascal before learning C (and prefer Pascal to C). The fact that Pascal and VB.NET share syntactical smilarities (type declarations follow variable and function names, the Not keyword) is probably not an insignificant factor.

Lastly, Microsoft announced that evolution of the VB.NET language has concluded, (although it will support .Net 5). This is welcome because it makes things predictable -- modernising legacy codebases (Interact has gone through two major refreshes) takes ages.

My all-time favourite language 😃

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