Sun to offer Visual Basic to Java conversion tool

Later this year, Sun will release a tool that allows the millions of VisualBasic programmers to port their existing code to Java. Visual Basic is themost popular programming ever created--by far--and it was "natural" that Sun develop such a tool, according to the company.

Interestingly, I had proposed a similar tool at a Microsoft MegaSummit inJanuary: my idea was a Visual Basic plug-in that would allow you to writeJava byte codes. There's no reason that Java applets and applications haveto be written in Java, if you think about it. Why not use a better knownor more accessible language? There are already Ada byte code generators on the market for example