Like always Tiobe Softwares has released rankings of programming languages and popularity of programing languages for the month of January 2009. 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

• Java Still topping the chart at 1, loosing a small fraction of popularity
• C is gaining popularity and is firm on 2nd spot
• C++ is gaining ground
• PHP came down one place
• ABAP is becoming popular
• Python is down one place
• Perl and Delphi goes down by one spot each

Programming languages last few months rankings:

• 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 Jan 2009	Position Jan 2008	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings Jan 2009	Delta Jan 2008	Status
1	1		Java	19.022%	-1.83%	A
2	2		C	15.931%	+2.01%	A
3	5		C++	10.116%	+1.39%	A
4	3		(Visual) Basic	9.161%	-1.80%	A
5	4		PHP	8.882%	-0.31%	A
6	8		C#	5.609%	+0.75%	A
7	6		Python	4.731%	-0.81%	A
8	7		Perl	4.303%	-0.94%	A
9	10		JavaScript	3.360%	+0.16%	A
10	9		Delphi	3.303%	-0.03%	A
11	11		Ruby	3.149%	+0.80%	A
12	14		D	1.022%	-0.15%	A
13	12		PL/SQL	1.006%	-0.22%	A
14	13		SAS	0.797%	-0.41%	A
15	18		Pascal	0.661%	+0.21%	B
16	20		Logo	0.632%	+0.25%	B
17	15		COBOL	0.579%	-0.35%	B
18	28		ABAP	0.537%	+0.34%	B
19	17		FoxPro/xBase	0.477%	-0.03%	B
20	21		ActionScript	0.455%	+0.11%	B

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.

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, bc, Beta, Boo, C shell, cg, Ch, Clean, cT, Curl, Dylan, Eiffel, Factor, Icon, IDL, Inform, Io, J, Lingo, MAD, Magic, Maple, Mathematica, MOO, MUMPS, Occam, Oz, PILOT, PL/I, Postscript, PowerBuilder, Progress, R, REALbasic, Revolution, REXX, S-lang, SIGNAL, SPSS, Squirrel, SuperCollider, VBScript, Verilog, VHDL, XSLT

Long Term Trends for categories of programming languages

The object-oriented paradigm is at an all time high with 57.6%. The popularity of dynamically typed languages seems to be stabilizing (see trend diagram below).

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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