Visual Basic.Net soars but may tumble soon

Microsoft’s Visual Basic.Net language, which brought Visual Basic to the .Net Framework, has just hit an all-time high in the monthly Tiobe index of language popularity. But is it just a temporary high before the language falls? Tiobe suspects this could be the case.

The language was ranked No. 5 in the December index, with a rating of 7.127 percent. That surprised Tiobe, which offers software quality services. Visual Basic.Net also was ranked No. 5 last month, albeit at a rating of 6.49 percent. Although Visual Basic.Net's ranking steadily has grown since September 2010, when TIobe began tracking it separately from classic Visual Basic, the last two months saw a major spike in interest.

Tiobe sees Visual Basic.Net as a “toy” language meant for beginners. Although professional developers don’t think much of the language, Visual Basic.Net has many dedicated office applications for small and medium businesses, because it offers rapid prototyping and is easy to learn.

But Tiobe expects the Visual Basic.Net's popularity to wane again, sooner or later—especially because Microsoft is slowly saying goodbye to Visual Basic by halting the co-evolution of Visual Basic and C#.

The Tiobe Top 10

Tiobe’s list is based on a formula assessing searches on languages in popular search engines such as Bing, Google, and Wikipedia. The number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors pertinent to a language are factored into the formula. The top 10 for December 2018 were:

1. Java, with a rating of 15.932 percent
2. C, at 14.282 percent
3. Python, at 8.376 percent
4. C++, at 7.562 percent
5. Visual Basic.Net, at 7.127 percent
6. C#, at 3.455 percent
7. JavaScript, at 3.063 percent
8. PHP, at 2.442 percent
9. SQL, at 2.184 percent
10. Objective-C, at 1.477 percent

The PyPL Top 10

This month’s PyPL Popularity of Programming Language index, which analyzes how often language tutorials are searched on in Google, doesn’t even register Visual Basic.Net or Visual Basic among its Top 10 languages. Python and Java dominate the index. Pypl’s Top 10 for December are:

1. Python, with a 25.36 percent share
2. Java, at 21.56 percent
3. JavaScript, at 8.4 percent
4. C#, at 7.63
5. PHP, at 7.31 percent
6. C/C++, at 6.4 percent
7. R, at 4.01 percent
8. Objective-C, at 3.21 percent
9. Swift, at 2.69 percent
10. Matlab, at 2.06 percent