"ASP.NET vNext (and Rosyln) runs on Mono, on both Mac and Linux today. While Mono isn't a project from Microsoft, we'll collaborate with the Mono team, plus Mono will be added to our test matrix. It's our aspiration that it "just work.""
What's wrong with VB? It does no more and no less than C# does, with different syntax. Shall we just do away with English, because German is just so much more to my taste?
They're basically equivalent [1] and I (personally) would rather MS drop the engineering efforts they have in place with VB.NET and focus them on C#.
[1] In one or two places VB.NET has more functionality than C#. It has syntax for the CLR's Exception Filters whereas C# does not (although I believe the C# dialect that Roslyn supports is going to change this).
Now I've grown very used to the VB.NET syntax, and when I go back to other languages, I hate two things:
- case sensitivity and
- the semicolon (;)
I can live with curly braces ({}) :) though having each line be its own statement is very convenient.
There are several things to dislike about the VB.NET syntax (Dim being the most egregious), but I think many languages could adopt some of its benefits.
Groovy in particular did away with the semicolon, and I'm glad :)
Both Scala and Javascript also make the end-of-line semicolon optional.
What is not fine is the rest of the ecosystem. Going Microsoft usually means Windows (good luck convincing etc corp. to run on Mono), and sometimes, even things like Sharepoint.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'd pick C# over Java any day, but dragging all that baggage is not acceptable.