PureBoard

A very long time ago there were only a couple of dominant languages: COBOL, BASIC and FORTRAN. Many software systems have been written in these languages and there are surprisingly many of them still alive. Through the years COBOL and FORTRAN lost their popularity and are now between position 20 and 30 in the TIOBE index. BASIC survived thanks to Microsoft. First Microsoft created Visual Basic 6, now known as classic Visual Basic. That was a big success. After that, VB.NET emerged more than 10 years ago to make sure Visual Basic was compatible with Microsoft's .NET framework. This last move wasn't really successful, but at least it guaranteed that there was no free fall for Visual Basic. Since VB.NET and classic Visual Basic were actually two completely different languages, the community didn't know what to do and that wasn't good for its popularity. Classic Visual Basic is going down, but also VB.NET is about to lose its top 10 position, which means that we are on the brink of no BASIC language in the top 10 since we started tracking the TIOBE index. There are alternatives available such as PureBasic (position #43), thinBasic (#77) and BBC Basic (#79), but their communities are still too small yet to compensate the declining popularity of Visual Basic.