In 2014 Microsoft open-sourced Visual Basic .NET as part of the “Roslyn” project. For its entire life before that VB (both Classic and .NET) had been a closed-source proprietary language. And in a timeframe where standardized languages and open source languages were establishing themselves as the new normal, VB caught a lot of flack for that. But regardless, it was a product. The owned product of one company: Microsoft. Some people buy it, some people don’t. It sucks if they stop making Twinkies but Twinkies are a product produced by Hostess.

But, when Microsoft “hit the button” on pushing that code to CodePlex (later moved to GitHub) with an Apache license they fundamentally changed the nature of what Visual Basic .NET was. It is now an open source programming language. Not a product in a portfolio.

And every community of an open source programming language, by definition, has a fundamental right to self-determination. That’s the whole point. It’s implicit in the right to fork that the community has an interest in shared ownership with the project leaders (not owners). It’s got a whole “consent of the governed” vibe to it. It’s why they’re called benevolent dictators. It’s why Don Syme styles himself nobly as a contributor, not a puppet-master. If there isn’t a right to self-determination what does it even mean to be open?

“You can work on exactly what we say in accordance with our roadmap which is dictated entirely by us in our interests based on our priority, capacity, without your input or consideration for you and don’t even bother thinking about or talking about anything else because it ain’t gonna happen, nuh-uh it’s been decided already” isn’t open source; it’s just free labor.

Further, the open source model only works because the project leaders are part of the community. They don’t sit outside and above it. Linus isn’t a Windows community member. The folks calling the shots on Python aren’t predominantly Lua developers. Don may be a phenomenally brilliant F# developer, with years of knowledge, experience, and technical skill that enables him to lead the F# language but he derives the legitimacy of leadership because he is an F# developer. Same goes for the rest of the F# team @ Microsoft. Only when project leadership is part of the community does that leadership uphold the fundamental right to self-determination because they are part of the self.

The open-source programming language VB.NET’s developer community likewise has a fundamental right to self-determination and satisfying outsiders cannot be a perquisite to self-determination, by definition.

A peculiar quality

This is a writing about Visual Basic, specifically VB.NET, and a peculiar and seemingly unique relationship it seems to have with the rest of the programming world and particularly with its sibling language C#. I’ve wanted to write an article for a while on toxic behavior in the programming community in general, and specifically in some parts of the .NET community. This writing touches on that subject but I’m going to try to keep it focused on the role a particularly toxic instinct should not play in this discussion or really any discussion about VB.NET. The unique quality of VB is this:

Visual Basic .NET is (to my knowledge) the only programming language on whose community other programmers who are not part of that community feel entitled to an opinion or need and that that opinion or need carry equal or greater weight.

This is particularly true of C# developers and all the more dangerous because of the disparity in size between the two communities. And because the “The .NET Team” in Microsoft consist almost exclusively of C# developers (with notable exceptions on Roslyn), I’m including them in the broader C# community.

Unsafe spaces

Whenever there is any discussion between VB.NET developers in any shared space, on a blog, on a mailing list, on Twitter, in a presentation, in a meeting room, there is almost invariably a C# community member who not only has an opinion on VB.NET and VB.NET developers but feels obligated to share it on equal footing and with equal weight to the members of the VB.NET community and the presumed, ingrained expectation that that opinion be respected.

This is not normal. Java has existed for most of my life. It would never occur to me to pop up on any blog post about Java at all and say anything, especially anything negative, about Java developers. What’s Ruby up to these days? I don’t know. When someone tweets about JavaScript there isn’t any foul impulse swelling within me that just has to escape. I’ve never seen a VB.NET programmer make a sweeping, offensive statement about F# developers or their feelings about the future of the F# language let alone present that statement as if it’s a legitimate contribution to a discussion about F# or within that community.

What I love about F# and have observed inside and out of Microsoft is that most people seem to think they aren’t smart enough to contribute in any way to a conversation about F#. It’s a multi-paradigm language with all the same features and capabilities as C# but they just can’t reason about it. They are quiet and humble because they’re afraid they’ll open their mouths and say something about something they don’t understand and look bad. At worse they’ll say “that looks confusing” and just sort of wander off. They don’t hijack the conversation.

Ex-officio my role as VB language PM, I sat on the C# design team for a while (just as I asked the F# PM to sit on the VB design meeting). I had opinions. I offered suggestions. But I never advanced the idea that I was more than a guest in that conversation or that my feelings about the design of C# or certain features were important; because I’ll never have to live with the definite assignment rules (that I dislike).

Yet on the matter of VB.NET there are seemingly hundreds of thousands of C# developers waiting in the wings at every turn, dying to make proclamations and it is exhausting and toxic and literally leads to VB.NET developers simply not participating in mixed-company settings.

I’ve tried to create or maintain “safe spaces” for VB.NET whether that was the team blog, or the MSDN forums, or the separate vblang repo because I’ve seen how just by virtue of numbers even the most well-intentioned C# voices drown out the VB.NET ones. There was a fairly active VB mailing list I was on for years. Plenty of VB discussion. Sometimes positive, sometimes a little heated, but active. And when we elected to merge that list with C# and F# to create a unified “.NET list” I watched the VB voices just fall silent after every time one of them spoke on a VB matter 5 non-VB programmers would jump in. When it comes to VB, everybody wants to contribute their own fears, uncertainties, and doubts, and the deluge from the larger numbers is stifling the voice of the actual community members.

A big part of the reason I don’t engage on Twitter as much is because for any VB related tweet there’s high percentage chance (too high for me) that some non-VB developer will see that as their invitation to shape the conversation about their feelings. “I feel VB developers are old, fight me or I won’t stop tweeting you!”. “I’m not a VB developer or haven’t used it for years so I don’t really care one way or another, but, I saw this tweet/blog and thought it was my opportunity to take up time, space, energy, and oxygen”. “I’m happy for your performance numbers, and Imma let you finish, but how do you explain these CareerBuilder numbers for VB.NET jobs in my state? Do the data science for me and you can continue having thoughts or enjoying things”.

Check your privilege

A few years ago, a VB MVP made a rather controversial comparison. It was provocative and more than a little offensive so I’m not going to restate it, but in my own time I have come to an observation which quite unintentionally evokes a corollary:

C# developers are the privileged majority group of .NET developers.

When I say this, I don’t mean “most of .NET is C# developers”. I mean that if you look at the behaviors of privileged subpopulations in “the real world” (pick your analogy), the C# community exhibits an alarming number of parallels to certain negative behaviors of those groups. I don’t know if having lived my whole life as a Black man makes me hypersensitive to these parallels or if others have noticed this too.

I say all of this to ask, if you’re not a VB.NET developer, and especially if you’re part of the C# community to keep in mind the fact that you are outside of the VB.NET community. This isn’t about you.

If you want to show support, show support. But outside of that, have respect and humility for the fact that the people impacted by these decisions should be the people shaping the discussion around the decisions. You literally have no skin in the game.

• It’s not incumbent on us (VB.NET developers), to convince you (C# developers) that we actually experience pain for you to stop doing thing things we ask you not to do because it’s offensive.
• It’s not incumbent on us to convince you that we’re smart enough to do anything.
• It’s not incumbent on us to convince you that we will succeed at open source in order to be allowed to proceed with our already open-sourced language.
• It’s not incumbent on us to convince you that we like the web or mobile.
• It’s not incumbent on us to convince you that we hit “New Project” often enough.
• It’s not incumbent on us to show that we switch jobs often enough to keep up with the new skills.
• It’s not incumbent on us to prove that there are any new VB.NET programmers coming into the world (there are).
• It’s not incumbent on us to prove that the apps made by the new programmers are real enough or complex enough or connected enough or have enough concurrent users or generate enough revenue or sales volume.
• It’s not incumbent on us to provide a map to all of our social communities on every site and every IRC channel in every language so that you can survey them to see if the activity level meets your idea of living.
• It’s not incumbent on us to convince you of particular year-over-year growth numbers projected out over five years for you to allow us to continue being.
• It’s not incumbent on us to program how you program or how you want us to program or to adopt technologies at a rate you find sensible in order to justify being left to our own devices without interference.
• It’s not incumbent on us to convince you that VB really is distinct enough from C# to justify us having a preference at all (in 58 pages or more).
• It’s not incumbent on us to describe a physical impairment that keeps us from technically just using some other language.
• It’s not incumbent on us to disprove your stereotypes about us regarding race, gender, age, or anything else for that matter in order to earn the right to be respected.
• It’s not incumbent on us to provide a logical proof to you that you’re being disrespectful in order for you to stop doing it when asked.
• It’s not important that you are happy or unhappy that we exist.
• It’s not important whether you know or have met 5 or more of us personally.
• IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU.

So please, when you’re tweeting, or leaving comments, keep that in mind. And keep in mind that while each of you may have a thousand questions, and that it could even be education or fun to answer some of them, the answers to those questions are not actually relevant to the discussion because You. Are. Not. Us.

Forking isn’t success, it’s failure

This is not a decision that needed to be made at the VB.NET community. It didn’t need to be made for the VB.NET community. It didn’t need to be made at all. We have a fundamental right to self-determination that ought to be recognized and respected unencumbered by the fears, uncertainties, and doubts of individuals who are not part of this community in any way and do not have to live with the consequences of these discussions at all. VB.NET is no longer a product, VB.NET is an open source programming language that needs to be led by people who are actually VB.NET developers: the few within Microsoft in concert with the many more of us without. I’m not writing this as some prelude to a defiant fork; I really want to avoid that. If someone on “The .NET Team” doesn’t get why, they don’t understand open source as well as they think they do. This language needing to fork (if it comes to that) isn’t an example of Microsoft succeeding at open source; it’s failing.

-Anthony D. Green

Preface | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V: An Open Letter to Satya Nadella