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:
- Popularity of programming languages for the month of November
- 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 Oct 2008 |
Position Oct 2007 |
Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Oct 2008 |
Delta Oct 2007 |
Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  |
Java | 20.949% | -0.67% | A |
| 2 | 2 | |
C | 15.565% | +0.97% | A |
| 3 | 4 |  |
C++ | 10.954% | +1.37% | A |
| 4 | 3 |  |
(Visual) Basic | 9.811% | -1.35% | A |
| 5 | 5 | |
PHP | 8.612% | -0.89% | A |
| 6 | 8 | |
Python | 4.565% | +1.13% | A |
| 7 | 6 | |
Perl | 4.419% | -0.93% | A |
| 8 | 7 | |
C# | 3.767% | +0.03% | A |
| 9 | 13 | |
Delphi | 3.288% | +1.75% | A |
| 10 | 10 | |
Ruby | 2.860% | +0.47% | A |
| 11 | 9 | |
JavaScript | 2.670% | -0.01% | A |
| 12 | 12 | |
D | 1.333% | -0.26% | A |
| 13 | 11 | |
PL/SQL | 1.024% | -0.94% | A- |
| 14 | 14 | |
SAS | 0.600% | -0.78% | B |
| 15 | 17 | |
Lua | 0.551% | -0.04% | B |
| 16 | 21 | |
Pascal | 0.520% | +0.10% | B |
| 17 | 22 | |
ActionScript | 0.506% | +0.14% | B |
| 18 | 16 | |
COBOL | 0.491% | -0.19% | B |
| 19 | 18 | |
Lisp/Scheme | 0.485% | -0.09% | B |
| 20 | 15 | |
ABAP | 0.445% | -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.
| Position | Programming Language | Ratings |
|---|---|---|
| 21 | Logo | 0.430% |
| 22 | MATLAB | 0.404% |
| 23 | Fortran | 0.383% |
| 24 | Ada | 0.372% |
| 25 | FoxPro/xBase | 0.345% |
| 26 | RPG (OS/400) | 0.304% |
| 27 | LabVIEW | 0.248% |
| 28 | Prolog | 0.248% |
| 29 | DC | 0.242% |
| 30 | Awk | 0.217% |
| 31 | PL/I | 0.210% |
| 32 | Bourne shell | 0.200% |
| 33 | Smalltalk | 0.180% |
| 34 | Transact-SQL | 0.165% |
| 35 | Focus | 0.163% |
| 36 | Haskell | 0.161% |
| 37 | Scala | 0.147% |
| 38 | PowerShell | 0.144% |
| 39 | Groovy | 0.143% |
| 40 | Alice | 0.136% |
| 41 | Forth | 0.131% |
| 42 | Caml | 0.124% |
| 43 | Euphoria | 0.123% |
| 44 | REXX | 0.120% |
| 45 | CL (OS/400) | 0.118% |
| 46 | ML | 0.116% |
| 47 | Tcl/Tk | 0.116% |
| 48 | Natural | 0.115% |
| 49 | Erlang | 0.096% |
| 50 | Objective-C | 0.086% |
Programming languages long term trends
Following chart represents the long term trends of popular top 10 programming languages
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).
| Category | Ratings October 2008 | Delta October 2007 |
|---|---|---|
| Object-Oriented Languages | 57.6% | +4.0% |
| Procedural Languages | 39.6% | -3.1% |
| Functional Languages | 1.9% | -0.1% |
| Logical Languages | 0.9% | -0.8% |
| Category | Ratings October 2008 | Delta October 2007 |
|---|---|---|
| Statically Typed Languages | 60.4% | +3.8% |
| Dynamically Typed Languages | 39.6% | -3.8% |
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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