Since Moscow is the Third Rome and there are angry mercenaries, I present you with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Rome_(1527)

You already forgot that Trump had a lawyer with the name “Pecker” in the Stormy Daniels case? I think there were even more lawyers with penis-names, but I can’t remember all that weird shit that happened.

I so wish that D would have taken off :/

I used it at the time of the library split (there was a split in the community regarding the standard library, where Tango was the alternative). The compile time features of D were fantastic and they are still unmatched; as an example: For OpenGL (back then OpenGL 2.x) I could define the vertex attributes and had them checked at compile time when I started to fill the data with glMap! D templates and compile time code generation are on a whole new level, although it made tooling more difficult. If you know constexpr in C++, then this is nothing compared to what D has to offer.

Got it, but on the other hand (and as someone else commented): With the right settings, VB.NET can be en par with C#, for instance. They both compile to the same MCIL code, so it should really boil down to a matter of personal preference, right?

I mean, you could also use C++/CLR. Please don’t. Because at some point people like me have to maintain it and they will hate every minute of that experience.

I feel that many people don’t know that and tend to think back to C64 Basic, etc. and just laugh it off.

I don’t know if people laugh it off because of the 8bit Basics, I think it’s more because of VB6. And AFAIR VB.net was made to make it easier for VB6-developers to switch to .net. The real programming language for .net was supposed to be C# and I guess some people at Microsoft also like F#.

I also enjoy other “hated” languages like PHP and Java

But Java is not a bad language per se; I actually enjoyed programming in Java more than C#. Java is hated because of its Enterprise-stuff. C# has managed to get a foot-hold in game development and is therefore cooler than Enterprisey-Java.

I also like to play the UNO reverse card: I personally hate projects that run with Electron, for instance.

I don’t see how that is a UNO reverse card :)

Atari Basic was my very first programming language, so I grew up learning Basic. Having said that: I don’t see any reason why new software should be written in any Basic-dialect except for fun (the same kind of fun like writing a game engine in Ada) or because of legacy reasons. So programming on the C-64, or QBasic and DOS, a.s.o. all those are fun projects, kind of like reenactment of medieval knight fights.

In your case: If you feel comfortable using VB for your personal projects, then go ahead. But for me any variant of VB is awful, and this also applies to PHP. And in a perfect world we also wouldn’t use JavaScript.

Since about 6 months ago I’m doing the classical “read the official documentation and changelogs”, even if it’s as bad as Microsoft’s (their changelogs are good though). I guess we will enter a new era of RTFM while AI is maturing and we find methods for filtering AI generated noise.