Oil on the fire
In the “old days” I was working at an IT-department where people were programming in a lot of different languages. There were always holy wars between developers and mostly, it was VB against the rest. VB was a non-structured, “sleur en pleur” development environment in which everybody was able to create some badly coded application.
Since then, a lot has changed. I'm working at an all Microsoft development department and Microsoft has brought us VB.NET. With VB.NET Microsoft has made VB a complete OO-programming language in which you can do same things as all other .NET compliant languages. And the best thing is that if you program the same code in different languages it will all be compiled to the same MSIL, so the are no performance differences. Well...... not, at least according to this article on the Code Project.
It's nice to have a holy war within the Microsoft community. It keeps you fresh and sharp about the tools you use and explore their potentials. So, as the writer of the article says: “this is my oil on the fire“. And of course I'm currently programming in C# ;-)