Quote Originally Posted by topshot View Post
As far as the ratio of users, for professional usage I can easily believe that. It certainly is in the US if you base it on job listings. I'd guess it would be closer to equal if you include all the non-business folks.
I think you meant if you DID include all the business people - the non-tech types that use VBA or some variation. And yeah, I'd agree, if you include all of VB classic and .NET and VBA and VBS ... yeah... but that's lumping togther things that shouldn't be. By that token, C# should be lumped with C/C++ as well. And then there is a LOT of cross over. I highly doubt there is anyone on a professional level that uses one and only one language. Often we're using at least two, if not three. I used two daily (Vb.NET & JS), three if you also include SQL, and sometimes I also get into some C#...

Quote Originally Posted by topshot View Post
Only real concerns I have are 1) regardless of what they're saying now, is MS positioning itself to kill off VB in a few more versions and 2) how would converter or decompile tools work in those cases where one language has functionality the other doesn't.
1) I'm more inclined to think that they maybe be starting to divest themselves of VB.NET ... Not that VB.NET will die, but it wouldn't surprise me that in 5 years or so, VB is released as open sourced... the way C# is... The specification for it will be sent to the ECMA Scripts Working Group

2) How does that work now? If I take something that was originally written in C++ and decompile it to VB.NET... what does it do now? It gives me it's best interpretation of what the Vb.NET code (could have) looked like. decompilers rarely reproduce 100% accurate results anyways... they simply can't. So they take their best guess. Anything that comes out is always going to need some manual intervention and tweaking.

-tg