According to a 2018 StackOverflow survey (see source), VB.NET is one of the most dreaded languages whereas C# one of the most loved. However, my company is converting our suite of applications from ages old VB6 code to VB.NET (creating the new applications and all brand new applications henceforth in VB.NET), since it's an easier transition (vb6 -> vb.net).

I definitely understand hating VB6 but I wonder why developers dislike VB.NET? They both (VB.NET and C#) use the .NET framework, compile to IL of course and the syntax is very similar between VB.NET and C#, which I guess is a matter of personal taste (for example, if {...} rather than If...End If, etc). The only thing I really don't like is that the community isn't nearly as big as C# since, well, developers favor C# over it, so not as many new applications are being developed in VB.NET and the community is diminishing.

And I don't understand what people mean when they say it is a "toy language" or isn't powerful as C#? Maybe I just haven't done enough with the language to see what they are talking about, but considering it runs our far-from-trivial mission-critical applications, there's no way that it could be a toy language. Any examples of what people mean when they say it's a toy language?

Source: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted