Quote Originally Posted by VB6 Programming View Post
But even if people now refer to C# as just ".NET" (I see your point, but I don't fully accept it) that doesn't account for Visual Basic .Net climbing so high (the largest increase this month) to place it higher than JavaScript (which I believe is mentioned occasionally on the web) and higher than PHP, SQL, Objective-C, and many others - and ranking almost as high as Python and C++
Yeah, I can't account for the rise in VB.NET. I feel that the drop in some of the others can be explained easily (though perhaps incorrectly), but a rise, especially one that sharp, is hard to explain. My first thought was that they had changed up their algorithm. The Visual Basic category has a whole lot of VB.NET in it because they split two of the categories 50/50 between VB.NET and Visual Basic. A sample suggests that the real split should be 90/10 VB.NET to VB6 (with a tiny amount of VBA). If they noted that, they might change the algorithm to shift more of those categories from Visual Basic to VB.NET, which would cause VB.NET to jump up and Visual Basic to jump down. That's the pattern we are seeing, but they didn't change their documentation about the breakdown of the categories, so there's nothing to suggest they did that.

Other than that, it would suggest a whole LOT of new pages on VB.NET. Considering the total number of pages out there, that seems very unlikely. To see a significant shift, the number of pages would have to be pretty large, or possibly the number of links would have to be very large, and neither of those seems likely from anything I have heard.

So...while I can make up a reason for drops in Visual Basic and C#, and I can even come up with a reason why VB.NET would rise sharply while Visual Basic fell sharply....I can't support the reason with any evidence.