Last January Salon published an article "Is there hope for Java?", questioning the viability of Java:

Every month, TIOBE Software, a Dutch company that makes developer tools, publishes a survey of the most popular programming languages in use. The company uses Google to approximate the number of engineers who are expert in the language, the availability of courses taught in it, and how many companies sell software using the language. TIOBE comes up with a three-digit "rating" based on the count. Java is currently in first place, with a rating of 45.2; the next language, C, has a rating of 32.2, and C++, ranked third, has a rating of 24.6. C# is all the way down at number 9, with a 4.6 rating, one-tenth that of Java. "

But the headline at the top of January's chart tells another story: "C# Still on Track to Become Number 1 Within 2 Years Time." According to TIOBE, the popularity of C# is rising faster than that any other language...

Fast forward four months into the future, the TIOBE index shows Java now with a higher rating of 51.2 and C# decline down to 3.9.  In fact the TIOBE title is now "No Growth for C# in the last 6 months".  Just wondering, any chance that Salon will retract the article?  Better yet, write an article titled "Is there Hope for C#?".  I doubt it, nobody would really care, and therefore there wouldn't be much of a readership..

Speaking about trends, Evans Data Corp. has published a new survey about VB migration.  It shows that the migration from VB to C# and Java to be almost equal.  So if trends do continue, C# at best would have a third the popularity of Visual Basic today. Factor in this information with the TIOBE index and you get a rating of 6.78 (i.e. 3.9 + 17.2 * .43 *.39 ) that's a rank of 8.  That truly is a bleak future.