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Is Visual Basic .NET More Popular Than JavaScript? (zdnet.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the conduct-of-code dept.

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.

46 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Education by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 1

    Maybe because schools think the Basic language is basic enough to be taught to kids?

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    1. Re:Education by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Visual BASIC is not a BASIC ... it only has the term in its name.

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  2. Well, Javascript is an awful language by cjonslashdot · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Well, Javascript is an awful language by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      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.
      Types are usually obvious. And if not, the IDE needs only one or two clicks to show you the type ...

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    2. Re:Well, Javascript is an awful language by cjonslashdot · · Score: 1

      But the IDE cannot always know - the right hand side of the assignment often is a function (with an unspecified return type). I cannot tell you the angst I have had reverse engineering other people's code in Python and Ruby, costing me hours of wasted time and huge frustration, having to go hunting for a function to see what kind of object it creates, only to find that it calls another function, which returns some unknown object type, and so on. The same is true of Go, which doesn't really have types - hours of time trying to determine things that would take seconds in Kotlin or Java - and all for the sake of saving a programmer two seconds to specify a variable's type. I know that some people swear by type-unsafe languages, but I feel that they are looking only at the time it takes _them_ to code - not what is best for a team that has to maintain code over time. If you have to read other people's code, type-unsafe languages are a nightmare.

    3. Re:Well, Javascript is an awful language by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Type unsafe is not the same as not needing to declare a type. (Static versus Dynamic typing on one axis and safe type system and unsafe type system on the other axis)

      JavaScript is only unsafe in regards of a few stupid decisions about type coercions like between strings, booleans and ints. If you use objects it is type safe.

      Modern languages that omit declaration of types usually use type interference (like Scala). That is only relevant at the point of definition of a variable, functions usually still need to declare the returning type.

      While I agree that it makes some things harder to understand, it is usually the fault of the programmer, not the language. E.g. naming the variables properly and the functions that create objects, and obviously if the code is supposed to be maintained function argument types and return types should be documented.

      --
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    4. Re:Well, Javascript is an awful language by cjonslashdot · · Score: 1

      "Type unsafe is not the same as not needing to declare a type." - yes, good point. Java, e.g., is needlessly verbose in that regard. Scala fixes that.

      "functions usually still need to declare the returning type" - that's the real need. I have not coded in Javascript in a long time, so I don't remember the rules anymore. I know that Python and Ruby (and Go) are horrible in this regard, mainly in the instance of function (method) return types, having spent many hours reverse engineering people's code just to figure out what type is being returned and set to some variable.

      "naming the variables properly" - yes, and unfortunately, programmer's follow the "language's culture" instead of using best practices; e.g., the Go community has a culture of very short variable names: try searching a source code repo for instances of a variable called "name", or "cr" - you'll find hundreds of matches, and two of them will be what you are looking for!

  3. How was the testing assumption validated? by mykepredko · · Score: 3

    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.

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    1. Re:How was the testing assumption validated? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Their methodology is desperately stupid, as is their analysis. Deciding that SQL can come back because it's Turing complete is eye-rolling pedantry. And obviously the "popularity" of VB.net didn't go up by more than 100% in a month in any real way.

      But I'm not sure how I'd do better. GitHub is going to overrepresent languages popular for open source and independent developers. Meanwhile, a disproportionate amount of the world's .NET code is going to be sitting on some company's TFS server, opaque to the world. If you measure competence or job requirements, "crossover" languages like SQL and Javascript surely will be over-represented. Competency counts will also over-count languages used more in education.

      Looking at product sales (like books) or something would only get you some weird ideas about how people use Excel.

      Anyway, yeah.. It's dumb. I don't even think looking at changes in this measure is that interesting. Just noise.

    2. Re:How was the testing assumption validated? by Solandri · · Score: 1

      Microsoft Marketing: Hey, we heard some tech news website is publishing a ranking of programming languages based on how often they come up in searches with the word "programming". Is that right?

      Microsoft Engineering: Huh? Oh yeah, they do that every year.

      Microsoft Marketing: Would it be possible to slip in an update that makes each copy of Windows run a search on all the major search engines for ".NET programming" say, once a week? Y'know, not often enough to be noticed by people monitoring network traffic, but enough to tilt the results our way.

    3. Re:How was the testing assumption validated? by dinfinity · · Score: 1

      https://octoverse.github.com/2...

    4. Re:How was the testing assumption validated? by Cheburator-2 · · Score: 1

      It's worse than that. They don't count number of queries, they only count number of pages that are shown as a result of the query. Old languages with thousands of forum and blog postings naturally have an advantage this way, and also languages with names that also have another popular meaning. For example, Google shows not only programming links for "Dart programming", and also shows "Visual Studio basics" as a result for "Visual Basic programming".

      TIOBE is a bad-bad-bad index, I don't understand why somebody still continues to use it. It shows "TypeScript" as less popular than "Dart", "Visual Basic" as more popular than "C#", etc, etc,

  4. Re:More popular than anything. by mermeid007 · · Score: 1

    I use a lot of languages but I do all my prototyping on my Mac in VBA/Excel native code before I branch out into other platforms.

  5. Re:Also, popularity != quality. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Funny

    This isn't even a good measure of popularity. Just because a language is widely used doesn't mean there are a lot of questions and discussions about it.

    It is perhaps more accurate to say this is a measure of "Which language causes its users the most problems?" or even "Which language has the dumbest users?"

    So it is no surprise that VB won.

  6. Schools lean towards Scratch for teaching kids by mykepredko · · Score: 2

    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.

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    1. Re:Schools lean towards Scratch for teaching kids by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 1

      I haven't heard of any elementary schools using BASIC for years.

      I heard they switched to C++.

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    2. Re:Schools lean towards Scratch for teaching kids by mykepredko · · Score: 1

      Please give me a link to am elementary school that teachers C++ as a first programming language.

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  7. Re:Also, popularity != quality. by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 1

    Otherwise Justin Bieber would be the greatest musician that ever lived

    He is. To some people that are not you. Probably younger. They prefer to listen to J.B. than to J.Bach. This is what makes art, some indefinable qualities added to the technicalities.

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  8. PHP bashing by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 2

    At last, we talk about a language crappier than PHP

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  9. Javascript or run-time environment that's awful? by mykepredko · · Score: 1

    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).

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  10. Never understood the hostility by MikeRT · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Never understood the hostility by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Worse, Python and VB.Net share many similarities to the point that there are only minor formatting differences between simple programs. It's a good laugh to see programmers say they only use Python, and then bitch about VB.Net.

    2. Re:Never understood the hostility by DCFusor · · Score: 1

      Glade + GTK3 + Perl (or C++, python or other language of your choice) for running on a REAL opsys. Faster, better, cheaper. Oh wait, that's a NASA saying.

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    3. Re:Never understood the hostility by chispito · · Score: 1

      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.

      If you are supplying it for external use/purchase, you should be able to hire someone to write it in a more production-ready language. If you are only using it for internal use... There isn't a very big space between Office macros, PowerShell, and moving up to C#. At least not now.

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    4. Re:Never understood the hostility by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I use VB6 for all sorts of things. It doesn't have to be simple. It's no-work UI combined with the flexibility of COM and the Win32 API. And it runs without needing to install anything on virtually all current Windows machines.

      Compare that to the sluggish bloat and limited compatibility of a .Net runtime. Or the bloat and slowness of Java. I've never even had a Java runtime installed. It's fine for server-side or maybe phones, but for desktops/laptops, Win32 API is still the standard that everything else is just a bloated wrapper on top of.

      People can make fun of VB, but it's really a perfect meeting between convenience and functionality. High level when it doesn't matter. Low level when it needs to be. I've never understood why so many people prefer to do extra work, using a case-sensitive, terse language that's not optimized for GUI programming

    5. Re:Never understood the hostility by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      GTK is a C toolkit.

      However UI programming screams for something object oriented. Using C for it is just a pain in the ass.

      --
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    6. Re:Never understood the hostility by DCFusor · · Score: 1

      GTK is an ABI, Glade produces XML, and any language can eat it (at least the ones I work with) and there is zero need for my writing of any object, though the Perl GTK library produces a few that I just use (ditto for python and AFAIK C, but I haven't done a GUI in C or C++ since MFC and windows. I don't have to care what language GTK is written in, that's the point. I can write for it in any language that can eat the XML glade produces, I'd be an idiot to program for it directly, the WYSIWYG editor removes the need for that, and makes it easier by far to do good design.

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    7. Re:Never understood the hostility by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Most UIs I worked on can not be described in UI editors. So you always have to interfere with the API of the toolkit.

      I remember MFC ... shudder. I bought a Zapp license to not being forced to use MFC.

      --
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    8. Re:Never understood the hostility by DCFusor · · Score: 1

      DevStudio 6 had a very nice GUI editor and a bunch of automatic MFC macros that made good UI easy to do...but the learning curve on MFC was very difficult... So far, it was the best combo of GUI and code editor I ever worked on, and we learned how to munge our own data xfer macros as well, it was nice. Then they VB'd it to hell with that .NOT shit, I stopped getting paid to fix windows issues and write drivers for embedded products...and well, linux + glade + "language of choice" suits me better than say, QT and C++.
      Of course, everything has some learning curve, but being able to make a call like "connect all signals from widgets to subroutines" in one line of code kinda rocks.
      And html, css, javascript, etc...that's for grunts who like cubicles, I wrote real code and still do. In my opinion, of course. I'm lucky to have gone down the path less traveled and didn't have to go through that misery.

      --
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  11. Re:Javascript or run-time environment that's awful by cjonslashdot · · Score: 1

    How so? What runtime issues have you seen?

  12. Re:I've never actually even seen VB.net code in 20 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  13. A stupid question by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

    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.

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  14. Ugh by c · · Score: 2

    This is like asking if gonorrhea is a more popular STI than chlamydia.

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  15. And yet from actual code... by paulpach · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:And yet from actual code... by chispito · · Score: 2

      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.

      The VB.NET I was exposed to filled a roll that was so particular to the environment where it was created, nobody would ever want it on GitHub. It was hard enough to decipher in its native environment, it would be absolutely useless elsewhere. Move a file, query a database, rename the file, convert it to a weird text format, move it back, make a backup, and present a million pop up dialog boxes along the way.

      --
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    2. Re:And yet from actual code... by toddestan · · Score: 1

      My guess is that VB.NET gets a lot of search queries from people who aren't programmers but nevertheless are dabbling in it to try to get MS Office to do something it probably shouldn't really be doing anyway. So I'm sure it's a lot of "How to do X in VB.NET" search queries. Given that these people aren't programmers and that VB.NET isn't as simple as VB6*, I'm sure this means lots of searches.

      *This is because Microsoft actually fixed a lot of problems with VB with VB.NET, but one of the consequences is the learning curve is now steeper. To the point where if you're going to do anything non-trivial on Windows using .NET, you'd be better off forgetting about VB investing the time in learning C# instead.

    3. Re:And yet from actual code... by Cheburator-2 · · Score: 1

      TIOBE doesn't count "search queries". Instead, it counts "number of pages". So, Google shows something like "Visual Studio basics" as an answer to "Visual Basic programming", and TIOBE counts that.

  16. Probably because of legacy getting an update... by Halueth · · Score: 1

    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".

    1. Re:Probably because of legacy getting an update... by FilmedInNoir · · Score: 1

      whoops... sorry. We must of had the same shitty project at some point.

      --
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  17. Something else TIOBE didn't account for by FilmedInNoir · · Score: 1

    Another reason for a spike in VB.NET interest would be there was a big project to port something off it to another language.

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  18. VB.net isn't as bad as you think by tie_guy_matt · · Score: 1

    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.

  19. VB.net vs C# by nw_rad · · Score: 1

    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.

  20. Simple explanation by enrique556 · · Score: 1

    They've somehow got the word "Shit" confused with "Popular".

  21. Who searches for (language) programming? by Tony+Isaac · · Score: 1

    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.

  22. C# behind VB? Yeah sure by YoungManKlaus · · Score: 1

    stop kidding around

  23. Re: I've never actually even seen VB.net code in 2 by lonechicken · · Score: 1

    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.