The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
Programming languages rankings by months:
- Popularity of programming languages for the month of November
- Popularity of programming languages for the month of October
- Popularity of programming languages for the month of September
- Popularity of programming languages for the month of August
The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.
| Position Aug 2008 |
Position Aug 2007 |
Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Aug 2008 |
Delta Aug 2007 |
Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  |
Java | 21.571% | -0.20% | A |
| 2 | 2 | |
C | 16.178% | +0.48% | A |
| 3 | 3 | |
(Visual) Basic | 10.857% | +0.21% | A |
| 4 | 4 | |
C++ | 10.057% | -0.05% | A |
| 5 | 5 | |
PHP | 9.349% | -0.35% | A |
| 6 | 8 |  |
Python | 4.975% | +2.23% | A |
| 7 | 6 |  |
Perl | 4.694% | -0.63% | A |
| 8 | 7 | |
C# | 3.697% | -0.29% | A |
| 9 | 10 | |
Ruby | 2.920% | +1.01% | A |
| 10 | 9 | |
JavaScript | 2.892% | +0.32% | A |
| 11 | 14 | |
Delphi | 2.732% | +1.51% | A |
| 12 | 13 | |
D | 1.357% | +0.11% | A |
| 13 | 11 | |
PL/SQL | 0.679% | -1.15% | A- |
| 14 | 12 | |
SAS | 0.549% | -0.84% | B |
| 15 | – | |
PowerShell | 0.440% | +0.44% | B |
| 16 | 24 | |
Pascal | 0.416% | +0.00% | B |
| 17 | 18 | |
Lisp/Scheme | 0.379% | -0.21% | B |
| 18 | 15 | |
Lua | 0.373% | -0.27% | B |
| 19 | 16 | |
COBOL | 0.358% | -0.24% | B |
| 20 | 23 | |
ActionScript | 0.355% | -0.07% |
Ruby on Rails is Ruby stands on 9th Position just 1 step behind C# 8th Position showing Ruby on Rails is Gaining popularity. Interesting to look at the top 5 Java, C, Visual Basic, c++ and PHP as their position does not changed at all. On the other hand it seems like COBOL is loosing ground in terms or popularity.
Long term trends
The long term trends for the top 10 programming languages can be found in the line diagram below.
Other programming languages
The complete top 50 of programming languages is listed below. This overview is published unofficially, because it could be the case that we missed a language.
| Position | Programming Language | Ratings |
|---|---|---|
| 21 | Ada | 0.348% |
| 22 | Logo | 0.339% |
| 23 | Fortran | 0.289% |
| 24 | FoxPro/xBase | 0.289% |
| 25 | MATLAB | 0.239% |
| 26 | ABAP | 0.232% |
| 27 | RPG (OS/400) | 0.231% |
| 28 | Transact-SQL | 0.213% |
| 29 | Prolog | 0.206% |
| 30 | Awk | 0.188% |
| 31 | LabVIEW | 0.155% |
| 32 | Fortress | 0.155% |
| 33 | PL/I | 0.150% |
| 34 | Euphoria | 0.144% |
| 35 | DC | 0.115% |
| 36 | Lingo | 0.114% |
| 37 | Smalltalk | 0.113% |
| 38 | Tcl/Tk | 0.112% |
| 39 | Groovy | 0.110% |
| 40 | Bourne shell | 0.110% |
| 41 | Erlang | 0.109% |
| 42 | Objective-C | 0.104% |
| 43 | Haskell | 0.102% |
| 44 | ML | 0.099% |
| 45 | REXX | 0.095% |
| 46 | CL (OS/400) | 0.091% |
| 47 | Forth | 0.086% |
| 48 | Alice | 0.084% |
| 49 | Natural | 0.080% |
| 50 | Caml | 0.077% |
The Next 50 Programming Languages
The following list of languages denotes #51 to #100. Since the differences are relatively small, the programming languages are only listed (in alphabetical order).
- ABC, AD, Algol, Alpha, APL, Applescript, AspectJ, Beta, Boo, C shell, cg, Ch, Clean, cT, Curl, Dylan, Eiffel, Factor, Felix, Focus, Icon, IDL, Inform, Io, MAD, Magic, Maple, Mathematica, MOO, MUMPS, NXT-G, Oberon, Occam, Oz, PILOT, Postscript, PowerBuilder, Progress, Q, R, REALbasic, Rebol, S-lang, Scala, SIGNAL, SPSS, VBScript, Verilog, VHDL, XSLT
