Use of Visual Basic has dropped 35% since the spring, says a poll of more than 430 North American developers done by research company Evans Data. "Microsoft has dominated languages since the early 90s, but we are seeing much more parity now," said John Andrews, president of Evans Data, in a statement. "The use of scripting languages, as well as Java, appears to have limited VB's future market potential."

Developers aren't only leaving Visual Basic, they're also less likely to work in the Visual Basic.Net environment; VB.Net use is down 26%, the survey shows.

Java now holds the top spot, with 45% of the polled developers saying they used Java during some part of the last six months. C/C++, meanwhile, was used by 40% of the coders, and C# was used by 32%.

The survey also indicates that use of Ajax, short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is up 10% since the spring 2006 poll, with 28% of the developers involved in Ajax-style Web interface development at some point during the last six months.