[em-bee]

not sure why you are making that distinction. sure, a few decades ago, a single implementation meant that a language was not widely used. but that is no longer true today. the biggest example for a widely used single implementation language is probably java.

and learning ruby, go or rust surely is not useless

[TristanBall]

The point, I think, is not how widely used it is, the point is that you become beholden to a single, often corporate vendor.

I'm not actually sure what made the transition from VB classic to the DotNET version so disruptive, and so damaging to VB in terms of popularity and mindshare ( possibly that C# was better while still sharing enough of the benefits? )

But from everything I saw it was. VB mindshare just fell off a cliff from everything I could see.

I mean, you could say similar things about the damage and disruption about perl->raku and python 2->3, which are both effectively single implementation ( ok, less true of python ), but the end result seems very different.

Perl5 is still nearly standard in linux/unix, especially anything not embedded or real-time, while raku is niche, although perl5 is more and more niche despite that, with many, many haters..

Python 3 is probably as popular or more so than 2 was

VB is an also ran in DotNET languages.

So, I dunno, I think there might be more to it that just "single implementation is risky". "Single corporate owner" might be a better one, idk?

[em-bee]

ha yes, single corporate owner is certainly a different kind of issue. i agree with that.