Visual Basic
Erik Meijer · 2007
When people hear "Visual Basic", they remember Quick-Basic from the DOS days. As a result, their knee-jerk reaction is often that Visual Basic is not really a serious language, and they do not pay it the attention it actually deserves. In reality Visual Basic is a full-fledged modern object-oriented language with many unique features, such as static typing where possible but dynamic typing where necessary, declarative event handling, deep XML integration with optional layered XSD types, highly expressive query comprehension syntax, type inference, etc. etc. This makes Visual Basic actually more interesting to researchers and practitioners than the "popular" static languages such as Java, C# and dynamic languages such as Ruby or JavaScript.