Why Is Visual Basic.NET Still in the Top 5? December 2023 TIOBE Rankings Revealed

21CTO editorial: December has arrived and various tech communities are publishing their programming language rankings, so we present ours.

The TIOBE Index released its December ranking, with the top five remaining Java, C, Python, C++ and Visual Basic.NET. Notably, Visual Basic.NET has stayed in the top five for several months, moving up from seventh last year and sixth in February, surpassing many mainstream languages such as C# and JavaScript.

Professional software developers may not be very interested in Visual Basic.NET, often viewing it as a "toy language" for beginners. Nevertheless, many enterprise applications and small‑business office tools are built with Visual Basic, valued for rapid prototyping and ease of use. However, Microsoft is gradually abandoning Visual Basic.NET by halting its co‑evolution with C#.

According to Microsoft, C# has millions of users while Visual Basic.NET has only hundreds of thousands. Microsoft positions C# for cloud, mobile, and cutting‑edge technologies, whereas Visual Basic.NET is limited to Windows desktop. Developers worry about its future, especially since Xamarin supports C# but not Visual Basic.NET.

December 2023 Programming Language Top 20

Last month Go entered the top 10, but this month it slipped to rank 15. Python and C++ continue to battle for the third and fourth positions.

Note that SQL was re‑added to the TIOBE ranking in February 2018; lacking historical data, its index appears to surge suddenly.

Top 10 Language Index Trend (2002‑2018)

Ranks 21‑50

Ranks 51‑100 (alphabetical)

(Visual) FoxPro, ABC, ActionScript, Alice, APL, BBC BASIC, bc, Bourne shell, C shell, CoffeeScript, Common Lisp, cT, Elixir, Forth, Hack, Icon, IDL, Inform, Io, J, J#, Korn shell, LiveCode, Maple, Mercury, ML, Modula-2, Monkey, MOO, MQL4, NATURAL, NXT‑G, OCaml, OpenCL, Oz, PostScript, Q, Ring, RPG, S, Smalltalk, SPARK, Standard ML, Stata, Tcl, TypeScript, VBScript, Verilog, VHDL, Wolfram.

The TIOBE Programming Community Index measures programming language popularity based on the number of engineers, courses, and third‑party vendors worldwide, using search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu. The exact calculation method is described at the TIOBE website. Note that the TIOBE index does not reflect language quality; developers can use it to assess whether they need to update their skills or to choose a language when starting a new software project.

For the full ranking details, visit the official TIOBE website.