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.

Comments

How was the testing assumption validated?

[mykepredko]

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.

Re:Also, popularity != quality.

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:I've never actually even seen VB.net code in 20

[Anonymous Coward]

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.