Is Visual Basic .NET More Popular Than JavaScript?

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.

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