When comparing Visual Basic vs LiveScript, the Slant community recommends LiveScript for most people. In the question“What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?” LiveScript is ranked 67th while Visual Basic is ranked 74th. The most important reason people chose LiveScript is:
LiveScript has terse syntax for common functional operations like map, and ships with a library, prelude.ls, with many of the functions most commonly used by functional programmers.
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Pros
Pro Very simple and efficient language (in terms of number of lines of code)
Pro Easy to learn
Pro Capable language
Compiling to the same intermediate language as C# and compiling against the same .NET libraries, the differences between C# and VB are largely syntactic. Most VB features even have a 1:1 correspondence with C#.
Pro Huge community
Being Microsoft's introductory language, visual basic has a strong and large community.
Pro English-like syntax
Pro Flexible, won't get in the way of a beginner
A beginner developer can worry about the code logic first, and then learn the language. Visual Basic lets you do basically anything if you really want, while still having the power to be a fully statically-typed and object oriented.
Pro Sibling to C#
If you don't want to start with C# because of its high learning floor, you can start with VB. It is dead easy to switch between the two.
Pro Easy to deal with Win32API
Using platform invoke, it's very easy to use the win32 api in vb.net. Neat and clean syntax. Not a mess like c# (meaning those "{}"s).
Pro Designed for High-level functional code
LiveScript has terse syntax for common functional operations like map, and ships with a library, prelude.ls, with many of the functions most commonly used by functional programmers.
Pro Good amount of programmer flexibility
There's a huge range of features that can make common tasks faster.
Pro ECMA 6 Features
It is the declared goal of LiveScript’s creators to track ECMAScript 6. Hence, the language gives you ECMAScript 6 plus type annotations (which are optional).
LiveScript's module syntax is currently a bit behind the ECMAScript 6 specification (something that will be fixed eventually). It supports two module standards: CJS (Node.js) and AMD (RequireJS).
Pro Fixes coffeescript scoping issues
=
is used to declare variables in the current scope, in order to redeclare variables of outer scope :=
is used. This way bugs are reduced.
Pro Supported by WebStorm and Visual Studio
Cons
Con Almost as bad as Python, but less used
Con Bad reputation
Being a visual basic programmer, you're unlikely to be taken seriously by other programmers. According to the 2015 Stack Overflow survey, it was voted the second most dreaded language among developers.
Con Tends to get clunky due to prebuilt assets
Con Strong functional lean
LiveScript is designed to be a high level functional language. For people who prefer a more imperative approach it can be hard to get used to.
Con Compiles to unreadable javascript
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