Choosing between .NET Pepsi and .NET Coke

Jeff Atwood

17 Feb 2006 — 1 min read — Comments

I've increasingly come to believe that the debate between C# and VB.NET is a red herring. Choosing between C# and VB.NET isn't a meaningful choice. It's like choosing between .NET Pepsi and .NET Coke.

Pepsi vs. Coke

Either way, you're getting a cola flavored carbonated beverage.

If C# is Coke and VB.NET is Pepsi, then Python is Yoohoo. It's more than mild differences in syntax. It's a completely dynamic language with Duck typing where indentation is used in place of squigglies or End statements.

Wasn't this the promise of the .NET runtime-- that we'd have real, meaningful choice of language? That's why I'm so excited about IronPython. IronPython has been a fine proof of concept, but it had no IDE integration. Until now.

As documented in Aaron Marten's blog, the latest CTP of the Visual Studio SDK finally makes Python a first-class citizen in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE:

Visual Studio 2005 New Python Project

And here's the requisite Hello World example:

Visual Studio 2005 Python 'Hello World' Project

I can't see any obvious way to build a web or winforms app in Python yet. But it's coming.

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