I notice that Darryl Taft has a very interesting article today over on eWeek asking “Will VB 9 Win Over the VB 6 Faithful?”. I think the headline is a bit off, since the real question is “Will VB 2005 Win Over the VB 6 Faithful?” given VB 9.0’s status as almost-entirely-vaporware at this point. The answer to that question is “yes, definitely, in my opinion,” but time will tell. Only once we know what happens with VB 2005 will we really be able to start talking about how VB 9.0 will or won’t change that new status quo.
There was one section that caught my eye, though:
Will Microsoft’s play to win back developers be successful?
Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software in NY, said he thinks Microsoft should keep things simple.
“My impression is that the developers who appreciated VB for its simplicity and easy learning curve have long since given up and aren’t going to be impressed by language ‘featuritis,’ and are certainly not going to be pleased by a raft of complex new language features to learn,” Spolsky said.
“Those who might be excited by something like LINQ are the exact kind of programmers who already switched to C#, or, increasingly, Python. I fear that by adding these complex new language features VB.Net stands to alienate what’s left of its core constituency who just want to get things done.”
This is the downside of announcing these features at the PDC, which is a über-geek conference, instead of someplace like TechEd, which is more of a conference for normal human beings (or at least as normal as programmers ever get). Yes, indeed — if you go and download our VB 9.0 introductory paper, you will be regaled with all kind of cool geeky language features like type inference and anonymous types and query comprehensions! All aimed at the kind of language wonks who are going to be going to the PDC and downloading such papers so they can dissect the semantics of each feature on their blogs. This is fine as far as it goes, but the problem with all this is that then people like Joel start to lose sight of the forest for the trees because they start to think that the average user is going to actually have to give a damn about all this wonky stuff to be able to get their work done.
The truth is that if you go back to the halcyon days of VB 6.0, you’ll find a phenomenal amount of complexity in the language. Just go read a book like this one and you’ll find out just how many complex features went into making simple things work in VB. And yet, all that complexity and featuritis was hidden under a fairly approachable and simple facade that allowed people to, as Joel puts it, “just get things done.” This is really no different. The practical upshot of LINQ is that you’ll be able to take objects that you already work with every day and easily write queries over them. That’s about it. You won’t have to understand the mechanics of anonymous types, lambda expressions, type inference, extension methods, or query comprehensions to make it work. You won’t even have to know what any of those things are. All you have to know is that you can type “Select” and write a query. Something, I might add, that most VB users already have to do in one way, shape or form already. In many ways, the additional semantic overhead for many users should be almost zero.
The only difference between now and VB 6.0 days is that in VB 6.0 days we didn’t go to the PDC and talk about how VB was going to support the new IFoo interface and the new IBar interface and extend ITypeInfo so that we could support this feature and change IDispatch so that we could support that feature. No, instead all those details were relegated (if discussed at all) to C++ sessions about new COM features and VB just didn’t bother to show up. Now, instead of saying “you’ve got to learn C++ if you want to understand how the nitty-gritty of this language works,” we’re just saying, “if you want to know, you’re all adults, here it is.” But, hey, if you don’t care about all the new whizzy language features — and, let’s face it, most non-language geeks shouldn’t — then don’t. LINQ will just work fine and your life only gets easier, not harder.
It’s that simple.
