I'm sure this question has been asked many times, often vaguely with 'what PC language do you use?' but I will try to make this more specific.
A long time ago when I found out how cool it is to be able to hook an MCU to a PC (back then it was mostly serial, but quickly became USB, ethernet, now WIFI, or bluetooth) I started making windows apps in... VB6, then VB.NET, then realised how gastly VB is, switched to C# but still using .NET most of the time. After years of reading hackaday articles, and reading posts on here it seems we are spoiled for choice in terms of what language we use for the 'PC host side'. Be it for full compiled apps using .NET/C# or scripted languages, python, java, processing etc.. safe to say I have very little experience in the latter examples.
So, for jobs where you've made your MCU-based hardware... say.. for sensors or human interface etc.. what did you use for the PC host software? And do you still use good 'ol serial (be it RS232, USB-serial adapters, or RS-485) or is it more common to choose USB (HID class rather than CDC?) or Ethernet, for remote systems.
I constantly feel like I'm 'missing out' by not knocking up python scripts or java applets when I need a bit of bespoke software for my own projects, even though I can probably get a half decent GUI quick 'app' knocked up in visual studio using .NET in a few hours. - an example of that would be a small app that imports a *.wav file and sends it to a AVR MCU via serial port to load in a flash chip for playback.
I'm sure there is 'better' (as in faster, neater, easier?) way to make such applications and also it would be good for me to learn some scripting languages (mostly java .. but python seems very popular too). But I'm asking if people on the forum actually use these. I have always wanted to add 'data visualization' to applications (graphs, dials etc..) but being locked into .NET's tools I think is stifling. So what are the common languages and tools you use?