Poll was pathetically narrow in scope. (Score 2)

If you look at the number of people in "business" computing who are not paid to be full time programmers, yet who can assemble a database-oriented "Application" from parts with Visual Basic and some ActiveX controls, you're stretching the definition of programmer. How many people have "Software Developer" or equivalent on their business card and yet only know Visual basic? I hope that number is somehwat lower. I hope that it's not the language of choice for the average B.Sc. Computer Science graduate. I'm often reminded of an old axiom in computer science: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In other words, the surveyor started out to find the answer to the question they already knew: Does Visual Basic meet the needs of the people who use it? Yes. he/she/they surveyed exactly the right kind of people to find out if Visual Basic was still relevant to the small custom database oriented application building thing. My other problem with this is that a sample size of 150 people is laughable when they pretend they are answering the question "Is Java a failure?". Hmm. Does Java have a target niche now? Yes. So why not go and look at it's penetration in that niche. It's not news that Java hasn't replaced every other language for every purpose. Neither has PERL, C, C++ or Visual Basic. Welcome to reality. I'd like to know what the over 3,000,000,000 people who spend all or some of their time developing software think. I'd like that survey broken down according to whether or not programming is their primary job function, and ask them if their choice is dictated by job description or the "shop" you work at, or if you are off in a corner like embedded systems, etc. The number of languages that people say they know and have written software with would be interesting as well. Some interesting statistics could be calculated. For example, if 50% of people who know both Delphi and Visual Basic still choose Visual Basic for most projects, I think Inprise/Borland would sit up and take note of it.