I’ve written sizeable software in both VB6 and C# (both professionally too) and yes, what I said is true about C# being a more verbose language. This isn’t intended as a criticism of C# either. It’s just a natural side effect of C# giving the developers more control.
Plus there’s also a C vs ALGOL type argument with regards to which is easier for a newbie to read and write. C# might produce highly readable code to those already familiar with C-syntax but VB6 is ostensibly executable pseudocode. That alone counts for a lot when talking about the accessibility of programming languages.
Clearly, but that wasn't my point. C# isn't a more verbose language, if anything it's more concise. My point was to refute your assertion that "your average C# program requires writing a hell of a lot more boilerplate code than your average VB6 program"...which isn't true.
The C vs ALGOL type argument doesn't really stand up for me. I have junior devs on my team who've arrived straight out of bootcamps, college, self-taught etc with a broad spectrum of shallow language skills (PHP, VB, VBA/Script, Java, Javascript), and none of them have trouble dropping into C# world when they've never used it before. C# isn't any more difficult to learn than VB or PHP. Getting up to speed with the .NET framework is a much larger challenge for them than picking up C#.
But FYI, VB6 isn’t .NET. You might be thinking of VB.NET. And if you were, your arguments would be correct. VB.NET is an utterly pointless language. But VB6 is a different beast entirely (and predates .NET by several years)
In the 90's I was neck deep in the land of COM/DCOM and CORBA. Our proof of the pudding, for the stuff we were building to talk to CORBA endpoints, was whether our VB5/6 apps could consume our bridge libraries and start passing sane data backwards and forwards with some janky J2EE horror show. And then we did the same with .NET1 (beta) via COM Interop to those libs etc etc. This is why I know the subject matter well, even if it is 20+ years ago.
Anyhoo, that's my appeal to authority, but I'll agree to disagree.
Not actually true. I just created a new C# Windows Forms application in VS, dragged a button onto a form, double clicked and it took me right to the event handler ready for me to do something. There's no additional boilerplate or ceremony required.
Now sure there may be a whole bunch of code sitting in the "Form1.Designer.cs" partial class, but that's for the designer to manage, not you. And VB had this as well but the VB environment hid this until you went looking for it.
Writing Windows Forms apps in C#/VS2019 is as easy as it was back in the VB5/6 days. I say this as a former VB4/5/6 (and, cough, ahem, MS Access) user knocking out all sorts of stuff back in the 90's.