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Is Visual Basic .NET More Popular Than JavaScript? (zdnet.com)
Microsoft's Visual Basic .NET now ranks above JavaScript, PHP, SQL on TIOBE's index of programming language popularity, which ZDNet notes is "the highest it's ever been since [TIIOBE] started tracking the Microsoft language in 2001."
Tiobe analysts said it was "very surprising" that Visual Basic .Net is now the fifth most popular language, only behind C++, Python, C, and Java. It's even ahead of JavaScript, which currently lies in seventh place, down from sixth a year ago. C# meanwhile fell from fifth spot a year ago to sixth this month. The language index still reckons Visual Basic .Net will "sooner or later go into decline", but concedes it's popular for dedicated office applications in small and medium enterprises, and is probably still used by many developers because it's easy to learn.
TIOBE's methodology "basically...comes down to counting hits for the search query +"<language> programming," TIOBE explains on its web page -- though its results don't always agree with other analysts.
InfoWorld points out that on this month's PyPL Popularity of Programming Language index, which analyzes how often language tutorials are searched for on Google, VB.NET "doesn't even register Visual Basic.Net or Visual Basic among its Top 10 languages" -- and JavaScript comes in third, behind only Python and Java.
TIOBE's methodology "basically...comes down to counting hits for the search query +"<language> programming," TIOBE explains on its web page -- though its results don't always agree with other analysts.
InfoWorld points out that on this month's PyPL Popularity of Programming Language index, which analyzes how often language tutorials are searched for on Google, VB.NET "doesn't even register Visual Basic.Net or Visual Basic among its Top 10 languages" -- and JavaScript comes in third, behind only Python and Java.
What's even the point of that question?
If you want to go crap, go all the way or go home!
Malbolge all the way!!
They measure # of pages found im google (mainly) for some arbitrary combination of "foo +language". That's at best a proxy for stupidity, not popularity
Otherwise Justin Bieber would be the greatest musician that ever lived.
Spreading the fallacious argument-from-authority mindset like that, is harming our society, and should not be encouraged.
What I really care about is J++ and Silverlight, those are sure winners and they are going to be popular forever.
Maybe because schools think the Basic language is basic enough to be taught to kids?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Its only on imbecilic sites like Slashdot.Org full of guys who dont know anything about tech where you find ignorance about the fact that .NET is the defacto language for all real world professional development today.
That's why Microsoft created Typescript - to fix Javascript. Javascript is great for hacking together something that no one else will use, but for use in a team, it fosters the creation of mountains of muck that no one can make sense of. The same is true of Python and Ruby. Sure, you don't have to worry about declaring types, but you pay for that big time when you try to figure out the code months later.
So in RFTA this ranking, TIOBE is counting the number of times somebody queries "C programming", "Java programming", etc. while weighting the number according to the search engine used.
Where is the basic research that says a programmer is using a if they are doing a search on " programming"?
I would really like to see something like tracking the number of lines of code being put on GitHub for each language as a more realistic measurement followed by the number of contributors - that would give you a realistic idea of how many people are programming in a language along with the number of lines of code that are being produced.
Until we get something like this, how about we cut back on the monthly or more frequent /. stories stating that "XYZ is the most popular programming language" based on some arbitrary measurement system that hasn't been validated in any way.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I haven't heard of any elementary schools using BASIC for years.
Now the expectation is Scratch or a variation on products that use the block programming approach.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
At last, we talk about a language crappier than PHP
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Javascript, as a language is okay but I find its run-time environment to be the big issue - especially when you're (ironically) trying to do real time interactive programming (which I believe it was created for).
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
VB.net launched in 2002. Since then I've worked at 3 different employers of varying sizes, and NONE have ever used VB.net. They've all used a wide variety of languages.
PHP? Yes.
Perl? Yes.
Java? Yes.
Ruby? Yes.
MS Access? Yes.
BASH Scripts? Yes.
VB6? Yes.
Javascipt? Yes.
Flash? Yes.
SQL? Yes.
C? Yes.
There's a few notable languages missing here. C++ and Python, and I suppose C#. I've certainly compiled C++ programs many times, and obviously use them all the time. Python I've known a couple people learning the language. C# I guess I've heard of people using it in Microsoft shops, which I try to avoid like syphilis.
But VN.net? I don't think I've ever even seen a line of VB.net in my lifetime. I've never personally known anyone learning it, programming it, or who used it in their environment. If it's so insanely popular, surely I should know many people who've programmed it, had colleagues who use it, or at least heard of a sister company where they rely on it heavily.
The whole point of Visual Basic is to enable those people you say "lost your job? Learn to code" to use something that is less daunting and more practical. It was designed to be a tool for someone who has a simple idea and wants to either automate their own business or sell something to a niche market and make a middle class living.
Visual Basic was and is night and day better in many cases there than Node, Python, etc. You couldn't ask for something simpler than "draw the UI and start writing event handlers" for a basic, tiny app just getting started.
How so? What runtime issues have you seen?
No
Pity you didn't work at any that use R.
I hear it's good for statistics.
Growing up, me and my friends used to program in Visual Basic cuz it was so easy to pick up and whip out a nice looking app. But after Visual Basic 6.0, Microsoft cut VB developers off at the knees. They stopped making Visual Basic upgrades for years. Newer Windows operating system releases came and went, leaving all of our aging VB apps running very poorly on modern machines indeed (if you could even get them to run). When they finally got around to working on VB again, they gutted and scrapped it hugely before throwing VB.NET at us. VB.NET code was so different from VB6 code that you could not possibly port anything forward from VB6 to VB.NET in any reasonable fashion -- you'd be better off just re-writing your apps from scratch.
And re-write from scratch we did. But we swore off using any Microsoft crap at this point, given how horrible Microsoft had treated us. Re-wrote everything in C++ using Qt and haven't looked back since. Our apps are blazingly fast now and they can be deployed on any modern platform at a moments notice with nary a hitch. Through the years, Qt has kept pace with new operating system releases and continually improved while imposing minimal forward porting issues.
How many years has VB.NET been out now? Probably just long enough for Microsoft to start planning their next kneecapping exercise. Good luck VB.NET developers!
Then you don't get around much at all. It is widely used. And it is just wordy C#. Bytecode is basically the same. It tends to be more popular with people who don't call themselves programmers but who do it everyday. Nah they don't care what you think because they need to get their job done quickly so the rest of the business can make money. They aren't snobbish assholes who relish browbeating people with tribal customs and languages. It is used to get shit done.
VB, Fortran, Cobol, etc. All still in use.
It's popular in government shops. My bureau made the leap from VB6 to C#. Practically nobody else followed. When PA started off shoring most of the programming work, it shifted to JavaScript and TSQL (yes, this is as ugly a situation as it sounds).
I also briefly worked for a company that wanted to go from VBA/VBS modules to C# and thought it would be just great to squander a few years manually wtiting incompatible VB.NET code in between. You know, not declaring variables, Variants everywhere, using VB6 helper classes instead of the framework, stuff like that. Real basket case of a codebase if you ask me. Once it was clear they didn't understand why this was a bad idea,video couldn't find the exit fast enough.
How the hell would any of us know? We're each aware of what we use, plus what's used by other people at our jobs, schools etc. It's a tiny subset of all developers.
FWIW, I don't like either particularly.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is like asking if gonorrhea is a more popular STI than chlamydia.
Log in or piss off.
I mean, come on. There's at least an order of magnitude more Javascript in the world than Visual Basic. Maybe 2 orders of magnitude.
This just show how poor TIOBE's methodology really is.
Take a look at stats from actual pull request in github
The most popular languages are:
1. Javascript
2. Java
3. Python
4. PHP
5. C++
6. C#
7. Typescript
8. Shell
9. C
10. Ruby
VB.Net is not even in the top 10
Now, you can argue that these are mostly open source projects, and that proprietary code might be different. Fair enough, but I don't see how search results (TIOBE's method) reflect proprietary code any better than this.
Some still use it though, they were taught it in school and are too lame to learn something new.
I'm being serious, I like it. It's simple and it lets you mess around almost as much as GW Basic did back in the day. I'd say it's great for home use but for business I'd have thought they would have picked something better.
I've heard that Visual Basic does not scale up well into big programs, and the small programs do not require good computer programming skill. It sounds quite useful for a Microsoft Office wizard.
Serious question in the subject line. Specifically, say a small group of developers spends months adding a few thousand lines of code to a huge existing project. Each person has to understand a lot of the old code to figure out what to rip out, what to change, what to add. I'd argue that such a scenario, which I've been part of many times in my career, would make whatever language the project is using "more used" and therefore more popular than if the same people had started from a blank screen and written the same amount of new code in the same language.
I think not. I stopped caring about TIOBE when I realized that they simply cannot explain inconsistencies like this. All it does is enforce language biases. Are you using TIOBE to confirm if you're still relevant? Then you should be using Java... The most relevant language.... According to TIOBE that is...
Probably a lot of older software getting a revamp or needs things changed now and some poor sod got the job "add X to our current system".
Then you don't get around much at all.
So I've literally seen all other popular languages in use or at least known someone that's used it, but not the 3rd most popular language? I beg to differ.
Somewhere back in the deep recesses of my mind that I repressed for 20 years I know FORTRAN. It was the second language I learned. It's largely used in the sciences, primarily because the scientists who use it just don't want to learn anything new.
I've _heard_ of people who use COBOL, and I think I even might have met a guy once who coded it. Sadly it still runs on dinosaur like businesses that don't want to/can't change, like a Bank or the IRS.
But nobody would claim these are "popular languages". Sure, they're used... but popular? No, they're as dead as disco. Claiming VB.net is as popular is Javascript is just batshit insane.
Another reason for a spike in VB.NET interest would be there was a big project to port something off it to another language.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
I've seen - and done myself - fairly sizeable desktop application (some time ago) in VB that were just fine. Just because the bar to knocking something up in VB is low doesn't mean it's not usable to serious stuff.
Going back to VB6 (which with the scripting runtime was pretty awesome for productivity - and yes - decent applications) I can recall being told a financial desktop application would need to be C++ as it was too intensive for VB. Oddly the VB app was quicker than expected and delivered sooner (and more cheaply) than anticipated too.
Try substituting hearsay for experience.
the answer is no.
shut up apk
I used to be young too, and listen to crap. Doesn't mean it wasn't crap.
Those kids will grow up and agree that he's shit. Most of them *already* agree that there is much better music. (Bieber was nothing more than a walking instrument for "his" songs anyway. Not an artist.)
And Bach is "music" for mathematicians. It, like Jazz, misses the whole point of music. And on top, but this is my personal preference, European classical music has no bass and no groove. It's all about treble and melody. It's of course OK for others to prefer that, but for me that's just plain crap.
Jazz is snobish pretentious deliberate ugliness for the sake of technical feats and feeling superior. (No, you're not a depressed black US worker from the 20s!)
And Bach (my countryman by the way), goes ALL the way with the technical feats, leaving nothing else.
Bieber is crap, to tell you specifically, because the entire thing has nothing at all to do with emotions or telling touching experiences, and only does any emotional touching as a side-effect of planned designing for broadest "appeal" for a target group, for the purpose of making profit (aka leeching off of actual artists, to make them produce this crap to play it on the current human instrument vessels du jour, as long as they make money.)
Bieber would have probably been a nice kid, and maybe even a real artist, had he not been injected into this cancer of an organized crime of an "industry". I hope, when he grows all up, he still gets to develop into one by himself.
Look VB.net is basically just C# with a syntax that seems a little less scary to beginners. In fact people have written scripts to convert VB.net to C# and back again. VB.net is no longer like the qbasic or gwbasic that came free with dos. VB.net isn't even like visual basic 6. Actually even vb 6 had its place as it was a language that let novices quickly put gui front ends on things. Remember that anyone can make both garbage and good code from just about any language. True some languages seem to make writing unmaintainable code easier -- but if you try hard enough you can do that in any language.
Moving from VB.NET to C# is pretty easy. I made the switch ten years ago, but still do some VB.NET in maintenance mode. VB is OK, but there is almost no support any more (open source, tutorials, etc.) VB is not really easy to learn. Even VB script is not that easy. I would always recommend C# for people who want to live in the Microsoft environment. The tools are the best, and support is improving.
Sick Burn.
I don't think the OP is self aware enough to realize it though.
They've somehow got the word "Shit" confused with "Popular".
Vb.net is c#, but less nerdy. But programmers are nerds, which is why nobody likes Vb.net.
If I'm searching Google for:
- Java Programming
- Visual Basic Programming
- JavaScript Programming
What am I looking for? Clearly, I'm a student, or someone just curious about programming.
If I'm a programmer, experienced in writing code, these are not things I would search for. Instead, I'm looking for:
- Java Serialize JSON
- C# REST API call
- JavaScript Ajax Mathod
The methodology of this "study" self-selects students, or curious people who don't know about programming. JavaScript is everywhere, like the air, but nobody outside of programming thinks of it as a "language," and most probably don't even know that it exists. Visual Basic, on the other hand, is limited to legacy code in large corporations. It had big marketing dollars behind it, so lots of non-programmers heard about it at one point or another.
It's not surprising that the analysis came up with the ranking that it did.
Fairly sizeable desktop app?
Do tell us how big this app was, how many people used it, how much data was it accessing/displaying, what kind of complex calcs it was doing?
I would say that VB/C# are better suited to small biz and hobby users, but hey that's never stopped people from using the wrong tool for the job at hand.
stop kidding around
That might all be anecdotal. I've worked as a contractor at multiple government agencies. If they went .NET, they went C# every time, whether it was before I arrived or when I was assisting in the ASP to ASP.NET "modernization."
It's probably more relevant to do something as simple as an Indeed.com search (not the end all be all, mind you). Straight up VB.NET in most metropolitan areas vs C# in those areas, and you'll get numbers like a 160 count for VB.NET vs. an 1800 count for C#. And if that's the case, the numbers would be an even huger margin for Java or Javascript vs. VB.NET.