The popularity of programming languages

My post on Small Basic has caused a lot of controversy, and there is often an idea among disputants that Visual Basic is a dying language. In my experience and the number of familiar VB programmers, I think that this is not the case. However, let's look at the popular language popularity index - the TIOBE Programming Community Index . As you can see from the table, Visual Basic takes the honorable fourth place.

Position Oct 2008	Position Oct 2007	Delta in position	Programming Language	Ratings Oct 2008	Delta Oct 2007	Status
one	one		Java	20.949%	-0.67%	A
2	2		C	15.565%	+ 0.97%	A
3	four		C ++	10.954%	+ 1.37%	A
four	3		(Visual) Basic	9.811%	-1.35%	A
five	five		Php	8.612%	-0.89%	A
6	eight		Python	4.565%	+ 1.13%	A
7	6		Perl	4.419%	-0.93%	A
eight	7		C #	3.767%	+ 0.03%	A
9	13		Delphi	3.288%	+ 1.75%	A
ten	ten		Ruby	2.860%	+ 0.47%	A
eleven	9		Javascript	2.670%	-0.01%	A
12	12		D	1.333%	-0.26%	A
13	eleven		PL / SQL	1.024%	-0.94%	A-
14	14		SAS	0.600%	-0.78%	B
15	17		Lua	0.551%	-0.04%	B
sixteen	21		Pascal	0.520%	+ 0.10%	B
17	22		ActionScript	0.506%	+ 0.14%	B
18	sixteen		COBOL	0.491%	-0.19%	B
nineteen	18		Lisp / Scheme	0.485%	-0.09%	B
20	15		ABAP	0.445%	-0.40%	B

The index is based on the number of developers using the language, the number of software vendors developing in this language and the availability of training courses in this language. By the way, the presence of a large number of courses very often indicates the demand for technology and when people ask me what they need to know in order to be listed on the market, I suggest looking at what they are learning now - developing and delivering courses is not cheap, but for training centers business that brings a good income.
Those interested can learn more about the index and criticize it in the comments.
It is possible that the approach to ranking is not the best, the data is also not the most accurate (popular search engines and their statistics are used), but even this data is indicative that Visual Basic is not forgotten and will not go into oblivion soon.

If you look at the dynamics over time, you can see that Visual Basic practically does not give up its positions:

So I must assure you that the rumors about the demise of Visual Basic are contrived.