[mikeschinkel]

Visual Basic is hardly academic; they is a tremendous amount of line-of-business code that has been written in VB over the past 25 years.

But yeah, Go dev do not see VB's features as being "features."

[pjmlp]

The point was that many of VB.NET features are what many in the community attack as being academic and not worthy of being adopted by Go.

[mikeschinkel]

Given that I have worked with VB long before .NET even existed, I have a broader view of it than just the more recent criticisms.

VB's biggest problem IMO is that it tried to compete with C# instead of maintaining its original raison d'être which was to be a highly productive tool that required very little programming skill to be able to start building real solutions for business use.

But I digress...