Tiobe Softwares has released rankings of programming languages and popularity of programing languages for the month of September 2008. 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. According to Tiobe few of the major gainer and loosers are
- Delphi made a strong comeback and placed in top 10 mark.
- Ruby goes down to 11 spot though it was placed at 10th last time.
- C++ gained more popularity than Visual Basic and PHP
- ActionScript is gaining momentum and jumped to 15th rank from 23
- COBOL is loosing ground
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 Sep 2008 |
Position Sep 2007 |
Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Sep 2008 |
Delta Sep 2007 |
Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  |
Java | 20.715% | -0.99% | A |
| 2 | 2 | |
C | 15.379% | +0.47% | A |
| 3 | 5 |  |
C++ | 10.716% | +0.78% | A |
| 4 | 3 |  |
(Visual) Basic | 10.490% | -0.26% | A |
| 5 | 4 | |
PHP | 9.243% | -0.96% | A |
| 6 | 8 | |
Python | 5.012% | +1.99% | A |
| 7 | 6 | |
Perl | 4.841% | -0.58% | A |
| 8 | 7 | |
C# | 4.334% | +0.75% | A |
| 9 | 9 | |
JavaScript | 3.130% | +0.41% | A |
| 10 | 14 | |
Delphi | 3.055% | +1.83% | A |
| 11 | 10 | |
Ruby | 2.762% | +0.70% | A |
| 12 | 13 | |
D | 1.265% | -0.11% | A |
| 13 | 11 | |
PL/SQL | 0.700% | -1.16% | A– |
| 14 | 12 | |
SAS | 0.640% | -0.76% | B |
| 15 | 23 | |
ActionScript | 0.472% | +0.07% | B |
| 16 | 16 | |
Lisp/Scheme | 0.419% | -0.21% | B |
| 17 | 18 | |
Lua | 0.415% | -0.16% | B |
| 18 | 22 | |
Pascal | 0.400% | -0.03% | B |
| 19 | – | |
PowerShell | 0.384% | 0.00% | B |
| 20 | 17 | |
COBOL | 0.360% | -0.27% | B |
Programming languages Long Term Trends
Following chart represents the long term trends of popular top 10 programming languages
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 | Logo | 0.357% |
| 22 | Ada | 0.349% |
| 23 | Fortran | 0.303% |
| 24 | ABAP | 0.280% |
| 25 | MATLAB | 0.255% |
| 26 | RPG (OS/400) | 0.247% |
| 27 | FoxPro/xBase | 0.217% |
| 28 | Prolog | 0.210% |
| 29 | Transact-SQL | 0.204% |
| 30 | Awk | 0.194% |
| 31 | LabVIEW | 0.170% |
| 32 | PL/I | 0.167% |
| 33 | DC | 0.165% |
| 34 | Euphoria | 0.148% |
| 35 | Haskell | 0.124% |
| 36 | Smalltalk | 0.123% |
| 37 | Tcl/Tk | 0.122% |
| 38 | REXX | 0.116% |
| 39 | Groovy | 0.115% |
| 40 | Bourne shell | 0.113% |
| 41 | ML | 0.112% |
| 42 | Forth | 0.107% |
| 43 | Objective-C | 0.105% |
| 44 | Erlang | 0.105% |
| 45 | CL (OS/400) | 0.096% |
| 46 | Alice | 0.092% |
| 47 | Scala | 0.090% |
| 48 | Natural | 0.080% |
| 49 | Caml | 0.076% |
| 50 | APL | 0.072% |
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, Alpha, Applescript, AspectJ, Beta, Boo, C shell, cg, Ch, Clarion, Clean, cT, Curl, Dylan, Eiffel, Factor, Felix, Focus, Fortress, Icon, IDL, Inform, Io, Lingo, MAD, Magic, Maple, Mathematica, MOO, MUMPS, NXT-G, Oberon, Occam, Oz, PILOT, Postscript, PowerBuilder, Progress, Q, R, REALbasic, Rebol, Revolution, S-lang, SIGNAL, SPSS, VBScript, VHDL, XSLT
Well many people are criticizing their rankings and algorithm used to calculate rankings so its up to you to believe. Feel free to post your comments and your 2 cents of their ranking system. Do you think its proper or its based on assumptions?
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