I would not be surprised in the least if Tiobe's re-jiggered metrics show that a ton of what they had been counting as "Visual Basic" turns out to be some VB.Net they couldn't isolate out plus a lot of VBA.

But then "jiggering" seems to be what they are best at, otherwise it is hard to fathom how C, C++, Objective-C, a hatful of bizarre *nix-centric scripting languages, F#, etc. consistently rank so high.


I suppose you could turn it around. Based on their sources of statistics these might really be rankings of "languages having the most groaning and moaning and cries for help."