TIOBE Index has released its list of top programming languages for December 2018 with a surprising finding that Microsoft’s Visual Basic .NET is moving up the ranks. The language now stands at number 5 compared to being at number 7 last year.
Visual Basic is a multi-paradigm, object-oriented programming language. According to TIOBE, the reason why its rise is surprising is because not many professional software developers pay a lot of attention to the language.
“It is considered a toy language meant for people who start to learn programming. This is true, but it can’t be denied that there are many programs and applications written in Visual Basic, also in the professional domain. Many dedicated office applications for small and medium enterprises have been developed with this programming language because of its rapid prototyping and because it is easy to pick up,” TIOBE wrote in the report.
TIOBE does note that Microsoft is slowly pouring fewer resources into Visual Basic, and it expects the language to decline sooner or later.
The TIOBE Index is meant to represent the most popular programming languages. According to TIOBE, the top 10 programming languages for the month are: Java, C, Python, C++, Visual Basic .NET, C#, JavaScript, PHP, SQL and Objective-C.
