This morning I heard some devastating news – Bill McCarthy, author of the @Head blog, has been evicted from a community discussion alias for being inflammatory and using derogatory language. As a courtesy to the VB community Bill has posted his thoughts about VB being the n*gg*r of Microsoft’s programming languages.
Whilst I can understand that this post could be taken as being culturally insensitive I think this is an over the top reaction, essentially trying to cover up a real issue that the VB community have been fighting for years. Regardless of what Microsoft says, VB is not given the same level of respect as C#. This is not to say that the VB product team doesn’t do a fantastic job of both innovating with both language and IDE features, because as a long time VB zealot I’m still yet to be convinced to join the dark side… But honestly how many times do you see a framework, best practice guidance or SDK come out that has been done in VB first?
As a plea to Microsoft – please reconsider Bill’s involvement with the discussion alias. His contribution to the alias and the VB.NET community as a whole is too valuable to be lost.