Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008

Tiobe Softwares has released rankings of programming languages and popularity of programing languages for the month of October 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

  • PowerShell lost its last month 19th place and dipped to 38th position
  • PHP is still stable at 5th place
  • Delphi is still in top 10
  • Ruby is stable at 10th place.
  • C++ gained more popularity than Visual Basic and PHP
  • COBOL is loosing ground

Programming languages rankings by month:

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
Oct 2008
Position
Oct 2007
Delta in PositionProgramming LanguageRatings
Oct 2008
Delta
Oct 2007
Status
11Same Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Java20.949%-0.67%A
22Same Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008C15.565%+0.97%A
34Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008C++10.954%+1.37%A
43Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008(Visual) Basic9.811%-1.35%A
55Same Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008PHP8.612%-0.89%A
68Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Python4.565%+1.13%A
76Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Perl4.419%-0.93%A
87Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008C#3.767%+0.03%A
913Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Delphi3.288%+1.75%A
1010Same Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Ruby2.860%+0.47%A
119Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008JavaScript2.670%-0.01%A
1212Same Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008D1.333%-0.26%A
1311Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008PL/SQL1.024%-0.94%A-
1414Same Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008SAS0.600%-0.78%B
1517Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Lua0.551%-0.04%B
1621Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Pascal0.520%+0.10%B
1722Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Up Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008ActionScript0.506%+0.14%B
1816Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008COBOL0.491%-0.19%B
1918Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Lisp/Scheme0.485%-0.09%B
2015Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008Down Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008ABAP0.445%-0.40%B

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.

PositionProgramming LanguageRatings
21Logo0.430%
22MATLAB0.404%
23Fortran0.383%
24Ada0.372%
25FoxPro/xBase0.345%
26RPG (OS/400)0.304%
27LabVIEW0.248%
28Prolog0.248%
29DC0.242%
30Awk0.217%
31PL/I0.210%
32Bourne shell0.200%
33Smalltalk0.180%
34Transact-SQL0.165%
35Focus0.163%
36Haskell0.161%
37Scala0.147%
38PowerShell0.144%
39Groovy0.143%
40Alice0.136%
41Forth0.131%
42Caml0.124%
43Euphoria0.123%
44REXX0.120%
45CL (OS/400)0.118%
46ML0.116%
47Tcl/Tk0.116%
48Natural0.115%
49Erlang0.096%
50Objective-C0.086%

Programming languages long term trends

Following chart represents the long term trends of popular top 10 programming languages

tpci trends Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008

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, Fortress, Icon, IDL, Inform, Io, Lingo, MAD, Magic, Maple, Mathematica, MOO, MUMPS, NXT-G, Oberon, Occam, Oz, PILOT, Postscript, PowerBuilder, Progress, Q, R, REALbasic, Revolution, S-lang, SIGNAL, SPSS, 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).

CategoryRatings October 2008Delta October 2007
Object-Oriented Languages57.6%+4.0%
Procedural Languages39.6%-3.1%
Functional Languages1.9%-0.1%
Logical Languages0.9%-0.8%
CategoryRatings October 2008Delta October 2007
Statically Typed Languages60.4%+3.8%
Dynamically Typed Languages39.6%-3.8%

history paradigm type%20system Popularity of Programming Languages: October 2008

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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  • http://www.traveltowork.net/ R. MAK.

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  • Wecsley Fey

    Go Delphi, go !!!!

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    [...] Popularity of programming languages for the month of October [...]

  • http://blog.timbunce.org/ Tim Bunce

    The TIOBE methodology is flawed, doesn't support their claims, and is being manipulated by language communities (with TIOBE's approval). See http://blog.timbunce.org/2009/05/17/tiobe-index…

  • http://blog.timbunce.org/ Tim Bunce

    The TIOBE methodology is flawed, doesn't support their claims, and is being manipulated by language communities (with TIOBE's approval). See http://blog.timbunce.org/2009/05/17/tiobe-index…

  • http://blog.timbunce.org/ Tim Bunce

    The TIOBE methodology is flawed, doesn't support their claims, and is being manipulated by language communities (with TIOBE's approval). See http://blog.timbunce.org/2009/05/17/tiobe-index…

  • http://blog.timbunce.org/ Tim Bunce

    The TIOBE methodology is flawed, doesn't support their claims, and is being manipulated by language communities (with TIOBE's approval). See http://blog.timbunce.org/2009/05/17/tiobe-index…