TIOBE Programming Community Index for April 2010

April Headline: C programming language back at number 1 position!

After more than 4 years C is back at position number 1 in the TIOBE index. The scores for C have been pretty constant through the years, varying between the 15% and 20% market share for almost 10 years. So the main reason for C's number 1 position is not C's uprise, but the decline of its competitor Java. Java has a long-term downward trend. It is losing ground to other languages running on the JVM. An example of such a language is JavaFX script that is now approaching the top 20.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication 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, MSN, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and YouTube 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
Apr 2010 Position
Apr 2009 Delta in Position Programming Language Ratings
Apr 2010 Delta
Apr 2009 Status 1 2 C 18.058% +2.59%   A 2 1 Java 18.051% -1.29%   A 3 3 C++ 9.707% -1.03%   A 4 4 PHP 9.662% -0.23%   A 5 5 (Visual) Basic 6.392% -2.70%   A 6 7 C# 4.435% +0.38%   A 7 6 Python 4.205% -1.88%   A 8 9 Perl 3.553% +0.09%   A 9 11 Delphi 2.715% +0.44%   A 10 8 JavaScript 2.469% -1.21%   A 11 42 Objective-C 2.288% +2.15%   A 12 10 Ruby 2.221% -0.35%   A 13 14 SAS 0.717% -0.07%   A 14 12 PL/SQL 0.710% -0.38%   A 15 - Go 0.710% +0.71%   A 16 15 Pascal 0.648% -0.07%   B 17 17 ABAP 0.625% -0.03%   B 18 20 MATLAB 0.616% +0.13%   B 19 22 ActionScript 0.545% +0.09%   B 20 19 Lua 0.521% +0.03%   B

 

Long term trends

The long term trends for the top 10 programming languages can be found in the line diagram below.

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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 Transact-SQL 0.500% 22 JavaFX Script 0.485% 23 Lisp/Scheme 0.481% 24 Scratch 0.476% 25 D 0.463% 26 Bourne shell 0.437% 27 Scala 0.433% 28 Erlang 0.420% 29 COBOL 0.398% 30 RPG (OS/400) 0.379% 31 S-lang 0.372% 32 Logo 0.361% 33 Ada 0.357% 34 Fortran 0.350% 35 NXT-G 0.321% 36 Tcl/Tk 0.319% 37 Alice 0.317% 38 Forth 0.296% 39 FoxPro/xBase 0.291% 40 Caml/F# 0.280% 41 PowerShell 0.268% 42 CL (OS/400) 0.259% 43 Prolog 0.258% 44 Groovy 0.238% 45 Smalltalk 0.221% 46 VHDL 0.220% 47 J 0.213% 48 C shell 0.198% 49 MAX/MSP 0.196% 50 VBScript 0.186%

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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).

• AD, Algol, Alpha, APL, Applescript, Awk, Beta, cg, Clean, cT, Dylan, Eiffel, Factor, Falcon, Focus, Haskell, Heron, Icon, IDL, Informix-4GL, Io, LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI, Lingo, MAD, Maple, Mathematica, ML, Modula-2, Modula-3, MOO, MS-DOS batch, MUMPS, Natural, Occam, Oz, PL/I, Postscript, PowerBuilder, Progress, Q, R, REALbasic, Revolution, REXX, SIGNAL, SPSS, SuperCollider, Verilog, XSLT

 

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Very Long Term History

To see the bigger picture, please find the positions of the top 10 programming languages from 4, 10 and 25 years ago in the table below.

Programming Language Position
Apr 2010 Position
Apr 2006 Position
Apr 2000 Position
Apr 1985 C 1 2 4 1 Java 2 1 1 - C++ 3 3 5 10 PHP 4 4 14 - (Visual) Basic 5 5 2 4 C# 6 7 30 - Python 7 8 16 - Perl 8 6 3 - Delphi 9 10 7 - JavaScript 10 9 9 -

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Programming Language Hall of Fame

The hall of fame listing all "Programming Language of the Year" award winners is shown below.

Year Winner 2009 Go 2008 C 2007 Python 2006 Ruby 2005 Java 2004 PHP 2003 C++

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Categories of Programming Languages

In the tables below some long term trends are listed about categories of languages. Object-oriented statically typed languages are most popular for more than 4 years now.

Category Ratings Apr 2010 Delta Apr 2009 Object-Oriented Languages 54.2% -1.7% Procedural Languages 41.3% +1.4% Functional Languages 2.7% -0.3% Logical Languages 1.7% +0.5%

Category Ratings Apr 2010 Delta Apr 2009 Statically Typed Languages 61.4% +4.2% Dynamically Typed Languages 38.6% -4.2%

 

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This Month's Changes in the Index

This month the following changes have been made to the definition of the index:

• Ron Murawski suggested to add the programming languages Vala and Genie. These 2 new GObject compatible programming languages are closely related to each other. They entered the chart at position 122. Thanks Ron!
• Laurent Sansonetti proposed to add the language Clojure to the Lisp/Scheme grouping. So far we tracked Clojure separately, but it is so close to Lisp and Scheme that it is indeed better to join it with the other Lisp like languages.
• There are still lots of mails that need to be processed. As soon as there is more time available the mails will be answered. Please be patient.

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Bugs & Change Requests

This is the top 3 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.

1. Add queries for other natural languages (apart from English). The idea is to start with the Chinese search engine Baidu.
2. Apart from " programming", also other queries such as "programming with " should be tried out.
3. There is a bug in the calculation of the max of all entries in a language group.

 

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Frequently Asked Questions

• Q: What definition of programming languages has been used?
  
  

  A: A language is considered a programming language if it is Turing complete. As a consequence, HTML and XML are not considered programming languages. This also holds for data query language SQL. SQL is not a programming language because it is, for instance, impossible to write an infinite loop in it. On the other hand, SQL extensions PL/SQL and Transact-SQL are programming languages. ASP and ASP.NET are also not programming languages because they make use of other languages such as JavaScript and VBScript or .NET compatible languages. The same is true for frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, Cocoa, and technologies such as AJAX. Finally, we have also excluded assembly languages, although Turing complete, because they have a very different nature.

• Q: How are dialects of languages grouped?

  A: Some languages are grouped together because they are very similar to each other. An example is the language entry Basic which covers Visual Basic, QBasic, Microsoft Basic, etc. VB.NET has been added as well to the Visual Basic entry because it is often referred to as Visual Basic. The ratings for a collection of languages is calculated by taking the maximum of all individual entries (not its sum!).

• 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 (pages that mention for instance both Visual Basic 6.0 and VB.NET). 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 (such as the xBase/FoxPro grouping), 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.

• Q: Am I allowed to show the TIOBE index in my weblog/presentation/publication?

  A: This is OK provided that you refer to its original source: www.tiobe.com.

• 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 1,500 US$ for the complete data set. This might seem a lot of money but it is considered strategic data. The data set runs from June 2001 till today. It started with 25 languages back in 2001, and now measures more than 150 languages at least 10 times per month. The data are availabe in comma separated format. Part of the deal is that new data will be send to you for 1 extra year. Please contact sales@tiobe.com for more information.

• 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.

• Q: Why is YouTube used as a search engine for the TIOBE index?

  A: First of all, YouTube counts only for 7% 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.