Is 2010 the year of C# and … BBC Basic?

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I did a poll on the 8th of April which asked the question:

What language would you choose to use 12 months from today if you were given the chance to develop a brand new application and you were allowed to choose the programming language?

The result was rather interesting. Over 50% of you went with C#, three times more than Visual Basic (.NET), with C++ coming in a distant 3rd.

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BBC Basic scored rather well. I think this recognises that for many of us we miss the interactive environments that came with languages such as BBC Basic. Such environments are commonly referred to as REPL (Read Eval Print Loop) and part of my new attraction to languages such as Ruby are the presence of a REPL.

The C# vs Visual Basic ratio is an interesting one. At 3:1 it is much higher than what is currently going on in the UK market (as best i can tell) which appears to signify a trend away from Visual Basic and towards C#. Visual Studio 2010 brings co-evolution to C# and Visual Basic .NET. In real terms this means that some of the stuff Visual Basic .NET excelled at such as working with COM objects and Office become equally easy to do from C#. Certainly once we have Visual Studio 2010 there will be almost no reason (in terms of getting things done in less lines of code) to know both C# and Visual Basic.NET. Something to ponder on.