[rskar]

TIOBE tracks the trends (or at least hopes to) of people looking to learn/re-learn/familiarize/re-familiarize themselves about whatever programming languages for whatever reasons. That's certainly the most one can really glean by the stats on searches of +"<language> programming". People who are "googling" so are not necessarily just starting out in the field, or learning in school, or researching to decide what language to use in some greenfield project. What's also likely is they are seeking employment someplace or recently got work on somebody's (perhaps legacy) software; i.e. they're searching for immediate professional interest.

StackOverflow attracts a population of programmers interested in regularly helping out other fellow programmers navigate through whatever arcana of tools and libraries and frameworks and languages etc. It will mostly be this set that takes the survey. It also seems that it is the web/mobile technologists that predominate, which is understandable considering how big a deal web/mobile is. There seem to be so many new&shiny things in that web/mobile sphere, year after year ("Web 2.0" is so early 2000's), and that's certain to keep the arcana wheel going.

Fun factoid: Stack Overflow was founded by Microsoft alumnus Joel Spolsky and developer/blogger Jeff Atwood. Spolsky, while Program Manager on the Excel team, designed Excel Basic and drove Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications strategy. Atwood says: "I was weaned as a software developer on ... Microsoft BASIC in the 80's... I continued on the PC with Visual Basic 3.0 and Windows 3.1 in the early 90's... I am now quite comfortable in VB.NET or C#, despite the evils of case sensitivity." (https://blog.codinghorror.com/about-me/). Spolsky still seems proud of Visual Basic: "I am always saying 'I could do that in a weekend in Visual Basic' when developers tell me some feature is going to take a year." (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/06/the-stack-overflow...). Visual Basic has long been the "most dreaded" language on Stack Overflow surveys, and in 2019 explicitly got dropped from that year's survey. The very fact that VB.NET manages to be in the top 10 of TIOBE, and VB clinging to the top 20 of TIOBE, has often been given as immediate evidence of why TIOBE should not be taken seriously.