TIOBE Programming Community Index for October 2011
October Headline: Java is losing ground despite its new version 7 release
Java lost almost 1% of its popularity in September. If this trend continues, C will be number one again next month. Other interesting observations are that both Objective-C and Transact-SQL scored new all time highs, Assembly reentered the top 20, Visual Basic.NET gained many places (from #39 to #25), while F# had a hard time (from #23 to #46).
The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator 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, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, YouTube and Baidu 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.
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 2011 | Position Oct 2010 | Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Oct 2011 | Delta Oct 2010 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  |
Java | 17.913% | -0.25% | A |
| 2 | 2 | |
C | 17.707% | +0.53% | A |
| 3 | 3 | |
C++ | 9.072% | -0.73% | A |
| 4 | 4 | |
PHP | 6.818% | -1.51% | A |
| 5 | 6 |
 |
C# | 6.723% | +1.76% | A |
| 6 | 8 |
|
Objective-C | 6.245% | +2.54% | A |
| 7 | 5 |
 |
(Visual) Basic | 4.549% | -1.10% | A |
| 8 | 7 |
|
Python | 3.944% | -0.92% | A |
| 9 | 9 | |
Perl | 2.432% | +0.12% | A |
| 10 | 11 |
|
JavaScript | 2.191% | +0.53% | A |
| 11 | 10 |
|
Ruby | 1.526% | -0.41% | A |
| 12 | 12 | |
Delphi/Object Pascal | 1.104% | -0.45% | A |
| 13 | 13 | |
Lisp | 1.031% | -0.05% | A |
| 14 | 14 | |
Transact-SQL | 0.909% | +0.09% | A |
| 15 | 23 |
|
PL/SQL | 0.903% | +0.30% | A- |
| 16 | 24 |
|
Lua | 0.802% | +0.25% | A |
| 17 | 16 |
|
RPG (OS/400) | 0.757% | +0.05% | A-- |
| 18 | 15 |
|
Pascal | 0.721% | -0.05% | A |
| 19 | - |
|
Assembly* | 0.622% | - | B |
| 20 | 17 |
|
Ada | 0.609% | -0.09% | B |
*For more information about Assembly see the frequently asked questions
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. If you have the impression there is a programming language lacking, please notify us at tpci@tiobe.com.
| Position | Programming Language | Ratings |
|---|---|---|
| 21 | MATLAB | 0.573% |
| 22 | D | 0.539% |
| 23 | Logo | 0.535% |
| 24 | SAS | 0.517% |
| 25 | Visual Basic .NET | 0.481% |
| 26 | COBOL | 0.476% |
| 27 | Scheme | 0.427% |
| 28 | C shell | 0.422% |
| 29 | R | 0.422% |
| 30 | NXT-G | 0.410% |
| 31 | Fortran | 0.381% |
| 32 | Go | 0.375% |
| 33 | ABAP | 0.369% |
| 34 | Erlang | 0.368% |
| 35 | Scratch | 0.356% |
| 36 | Haskell | 0.355% |
| 37 | ActionScript | 0.340% |
| 38 | Forth | 0.303% |
| 39 | Prolog | 0.288% |
| 40 | APL | 0.276% |
| 41 | Tcl | 0.261% |
| 42 | ML | 0.259% |
| 43 | Smalltalk | 0.258% |
| 44 | Alice | 0.253% |
| 45 | PL/I | 0.252% |
| 46 | F# | 0.243% |
| 47 | Ladder Logic | 0.238% |
| 48 | Q | 0.232% |
| 49 | Awk | 0.231% |
| 50 | Scala | 0.226% |
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).
- (Visual) FoxPro, ABC, Algol, Bash, bc, BETA, BlitzMax, Bourne shell, CFML, cg, CL (OS/400), Clean, cT, Dylan, Eiffel, Factor, Free Pascal, Groovy, Icon, IDL, Io, J, JavaFX Script, JScript.NET, Korn shell, LabVIEW, Lingo, LPC, MAD, Magic, Max/MSP, MOO, MUMPS, NATURAL, Oberon, Occam, OpenCL, OpenEdge ABL, Oz, PostScript, PowerShell, REXX, S, SPSS, SuperCollider, VBScript, VHDL, X10, xBase, Z shell
Very Long Term History
To see the bigger picture, please find the positions of the top 10 programming languages from 5, 15 and 25 years ago in the table below.
| Programming Language | Position Oct 2011 | Position Oct 2006 | Position Oct 1996 | Position Oct 1986 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Java | 1 | 1 | 3 | - |
| C | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| C++ | 3 | 3 | 2 | 5 |
| PHP | 4 | 4 | - | - |
| C# | 5 | 8 | - | - |
| Objective-C | 6 | 38 | - | - |
| (Visual) Basic | 7 | 5 | 4 | 6 |
| Python | 8 | 7 | 27 | - |
| Perl | 9 | 6 | 7 | - |
| JavaScript | 10 | 9 | 16 | - |
| Lisp | 13 | 16 | 14 | 3 |
| Ada | 20 | 17 | 11 | 2 |
Programming Language Hall of Fame
The hall of fame listing all "Programming Language of the Year" award winners is shown below. The award is given to the programming language that has the highest rise in ratings in a year.
| Year | Winner |
|---|---|
| 2010 | Python |
| 2009 | Go |
| 2008 | C |
| 2007 | Python |
| 2006 | Ruby |
| 2005 | Java |
| 2004 | PHP |
| 2003 | C++ |
Categories of Programming Languages
In the tables below some long term trends are shown about categories of languages. Object-oriented statically typed languages have been most popular for more than 5 years now.| Category | Ratings Oct 2011 | Delta Oct 2010 |
|---|---|---|
| Object-Oriented Languages | 55.9% | +0.7% |
| Procedural Languages | 38.0% | -1.5% |
| Functional Languages | 4.1% | +0.4% |
| Logical Languages | 2.0% | +0.4% |
| Category | Ratings Oct 2011 | Delta Oct 2010 |
|---|---|---|
| Statically Typed Languages | 64.6% | +1.7% |
| Dynamically Typed Languages | 35.4% | -1.7% |
This Month's Changes in the Index
This month the following changes have been made to the definition of the index:
- Tomorrow, the 10th of October, Google will unveil its new programming language Dart. We started to track this language. Thanks to the many rumours about what Dart promises (becoming the successor of JavaScript), it is already at position 107 in the TIOBE index.
- There are lots of mails that still need to be processed. As soon as there is more time available your mail will be answered. Please be patient.
Bugs & Change Requests
This is the top 5 of most requested changes and bugs. If you have any suggestions how to improve the index don't hesitate to send an e-mail to tpci@tiobe.com.
- Apart from "<language> programming", also other queries such as "programming with <language>", "<language> development" and "<language> coding" should be tried out.
- Add queries for other natural languages (apart from English). The idea is to start with the Chinese search engine Baidu. This has been implemented partially and will be completed the next few months.
- Add a list of all search term requests that have been rejected. This is to minimize the number of recurring mails about Rails, JQuery, JSP, etc.
- Start a TIOBE index for databases, software configuration management systems and application frameworks.
- Some search engines allow to query pages that have been added last year. The TIOBE index should only track those recently added pages.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
-
Q: Why is the maximum taken to calculate the ranking for a grouping, why not the sum?
A: Well, you can do it either way and both are wrong. If you take the sum, then you get the intersection twice. If you take the max, then you miss the difference. Which one to choose? Suppose somebody comes up with a new search term that is 10% of the original. If you take the max, nothing changes. If you take the sum then the ratings will rise 10%. So taking the sum will be an incentive for some to come up with all kinds of obscure terms for a language. That's why we decided to take the max.
The proper way to solve this is is of course to take the sum and subtract the intersection. This will give rise to an explosion of extra queries that must be performed. Suppose a language has a grouping of 15 terms, then you have to perform 32,768 queries (all combinations of intersections). So this seems not possible either... If somebody has a solution for this, please let us know.
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Q: Am I allowed to show the TIOBE index in my weblog/presentation/publication?
A: Yes, the only condition is to refer to its original source "www.tiobe.com".
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Q: I would like to have the complete data set of the TIOBE index. Is this possible?
A: We spent a lot of effort to obtain all the data and keep the TIOBE index up to date. In order to compensate a bit for this, we ask a fee of 5,000 US$ for the complete data set. The data set runs from June 2001 till today. It started with 25 languages back in 2001, and now measures more than 150 languages once a month. The data are availabe in comma separated format. Please contact sales@tiobe.com for more information.
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Q: What happened to Java in April 2004? Did you change your methodology?
A: No, we did not change our methodology at that time. Google changed its methodology. They performed a general sweep action to get rid of all kinds of web sites that had been pushed up. As a consequence, there was a huge drop for languages such as Java and C++. In order to minimize such fluctuations in the future, we added two more search engines (MSN and Yahoo) a few months after this incident.
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Q: Why is YouTube used as a search engine for the TIOBE index?
A: First of all, YouTube counts only for 10% of all ratings, so it has hardly any influence on the index. YouTube has been added as an experiment. It qualified for the TIOBE index because of its high ranking on Alexa. YouTube is a young platform (so an indicator for popularity) and there are quite some lectures, presentations, programming tips and language introductions available on YouTube.
-
Q: How come that Assembly is so popular nowadays?
A: It seems as if Assembly is new in the top 20. This is not the case. Through the years we had a lot of discussions with followers of the index whether Assembly should be part of the index or not. Until now we could convince them to leave Assembly out. However, recently we defined objective criteria to qualify for the index and Assembly appeared to meet these criteria. So we added Assembly at the end of 2010. Since no historical data is available, it seems as if it comes out of nowhere, whereas it was probably in the past at least as popular as it is now.
