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Hmm? you never worked on a system like that before? In a lot of large corporates thats already a reality, except you have to use a different development environment for all of them! You've got it all to look forward to.
What you will find out is that after the first three or four languages another 2 or 3 makes no difference. By the time that happens you will already have an IL installed in your head. (WWIL) WetWare Intermediate Language. :)
OK, I'm back!
Rory Condon
Anarchic Chicken Software
http://www.anarchic-chicken.8m.com
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...the only real differences between languages have always been syntax.
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Actually, this isn't 100% true and it seems to be the problem Rory has. Right now there are many things that I can do in VC++ that I can't do in VB. However, I'm glad that's going away and that the only differences are going to be langauge semantics (syntax).
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Is there really going to be no reason to choose C# over VB other than which one you happen to be most familiar with?
I'm not very familiar with VB (I have the same union restrictions that Tom has), but what experience I do have leads me to believe that one can express complex concepts in C++ more elegantly and with greater ease of modification than one can in VB. I would HOPE that this will still be the case with C#.
My hope for and excitement about C# is that this possibility of elegance and ease of modification has increased from what it was in C++ - partly because the "clunky" parts of C++ have been removed, and also C# has a more intimate connection with the "system."
I'm also excited as a C++ programmer, who loves the language but is irritated by many parts of it, to feel that with C# there is a future in the new world order for my kind. I was worried that C++ was going to go the way of assembly language programming.
Mike
In answer to your question, I'll tell you (paraphrase) what Jeffrey Richter (who is also on the CLR team) told me regarding C# and CLR: "Because most functionality is being moved into the CLR layer, C# and other .NET compliant compilers are basically becoming nothing more than syntax checkers."
His point is that you can't really do anything with these compilers by themselves any more (unlike C++ or VB6). They are simply a means to get to .NET classes with the main differences between them being their syntax.
Cheers,
Tom Archer - CodeGuru
Inside C# (late 2000)
Teach Yourself Visual InterDev in 24 Hours