I found it interesting that one of the Microsoft promises about .NET was that we could have development teams where every developer used their favorite language. No longer would a development group have their language thrust upon them by upper management with everyone forced to use C++. Programmers could choose any .NET language that they felt was the best solution to their portion of the task at hand.
Now that .NET is here I am seeing shop after shop moving to exclusively C# for .NET development, even where they used previously both Visual C++ and VB (or Delphi, etc.) for Win32 development. So it appears that .NET has actually had the opposite effect - programming groups are becoming language homogeneous instead of language heterogeneous.
Part of the reasoning I have heard for this is that .NET removes many of the differences between C like languages (C/C++/C#) and VB, taking away the need to use both. Previously VB was used for quick and dirty applications, or ones that were UI dependent. C++ was used for everything else, or when performance was any kind of issue. Now with .NET we see that C# and VB are interchangeable. They both generate almost the same IL, and both have access to the same libraries and tools.
At a management level there is little to no difference between the two, but to a programmer there are many differences. So we programmers are being dragged into a greater homogenization of languages, where our choice and opinion matters less and less, when we were told to expect the opposite. Why am I not surprised.
No comments:
Post a Comment