If you're counting VB, it was
huge, just not cool. Nobody ever talked about it, but people built tons of really effective custom software for banks and the like. Maybe you don't consider that serious programming, but it was probably the most successful product of the RAD desktop era.
I vaguely recall a Joel Spolsky (?) podcast years ago mentioning that everyone thought it was dead, but a survey showed something crazy like 30k active developers worldwide. And that was classic VB, not VB.Net.
