I recently found Scott Bellware's blog thru TSS.net and I've been really impressed with his writings. So much so that I have I have taken to reading his blog regularly. You'll see I've got him linked here under the blogs I'm reading. While I'm not really looking to get into the type of “Open Letter” exchange that Scott has been involved in recently, I must voice my own opinion on his use of the term “Visual Baby Talk“.
Scott has twice referred to the Visual Basic development community as the “Visual Baby Talk” crowd/culture. I can only assume from this statement that he is one of those developers who think that C# is the superior language, and C# developers are therefore superior to VB developers. Of course Scott did not directly say this, but i believe it was intimated in his postings.
While I believe there very strong arguments that VB is just as good a language as C#, I'm not interested in debating that issue. I do want to point out, however that the use of the term “Visual Baby Talk“ is insulting to a community of developers and a language that made Microsoft the de facto leader in the RAD world. There are good and bad developer's in every space, and the assumption that someone is incapable of understanding or mastering a concept because of the programming language they favor is just plain ignorant. This type of intellectual dismissal is no better than assuming a Frenchman is stupid because his English is poor. To this I say, “WHERE IS THE LOVE?“. We should be supporting each other's efforts, not dismissing them. Regardless of language choice, we should be bonded by the wonderful new technology that MS has given us in .NET.
What's worse is that Microsoft itself perpetuates this bigotry in a variety of ways. Those VB developers that aren't living in a cave certainly know what I mean by this, so I won't make references.
There is enough (actually far too much) prejudice in the development community between Java and .NET.
Loyal Microsoft developers certainly do not need a wedge driven into our community by .NET language bigotry. We should respect our colleagues no matter what language they speak and twofold if they are bilingual. Those of you who think you're too good to be writing VB code have just missed out on a lot of job opportunities.
There are similar folks in the skydiving community. They degrade other skydivers because they themselves prefer a different discipline of the sport, have more experience, or more jumps or a better rig. They refuse to jump with “the little people” and stand around the drop zone finding ways to display their superiority. We call them Sky Gods.
NOBODY LIKES A SKYGOD