TIOBE Programming Community Index for May 2010

May Headline: Objective-C enters top 10
Despite the fact that Objective-C only gained 0.08% last month, it hasenteredthe top 10 for the first time. This is quite an achievement, especiallyif onebears in mind that only 13 different programming languages had a top 10scoresince the start of the TIOBE index in June 2001. The main (and probablyonly)reason for Objective-C's popularity is that it is the only language inwhich youcan write applications for the iPhone or iPad. From a programminglanguage pointof view, Objective-C (born in 1986) offers no new interesting features.
The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of thepopularity of programminglanguages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based onthe number ofskilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Thepopular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Wikipedia andYouTube are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE indexis not about the best programminglanguage or the language in which most lines of code have beenwritten.
The index can be used to check whether your programming skills arestill up to date or to make astrategic decision about what programming language should be adoptedwhen starting to build a newsoftware system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be foundhere.
Position
May 2010Position
May 2009Delta in PositionProgramming LanguageRatings
May 2010Delta
May 2009Status
1 2C 18.186% +2.06%   A
2 1Java 17.957% -1.58%   A
3 3C++ 10.378% -0.69%   A
4 4PHP 9.073% -0.85%   A
5 5(Visual) Basic 5.656% -2.97%   A
6 7C# 4.779% +0.51%   A
7 6Python 4.097% -1.45%   A
8 9Perl 3.286% -0.24%   A
9 11Delphi 2.566% +0.24%   A
10 39Objective-C 2.363% +2.23%   A
11 10Ruby 2.094% -0.60%   A
12 8JavaScript 2.084% -1.46%   A
13 12PL/SQL 0.859% -0.24%   A
14 13SAS 0.732% -0.07%   A
15 14Pascal 0.728% -0.05%   A--
16 22Lisp/Scheme/Clojure 0.651% +0.19%   B
17 16ABAP 0.650% -0.02%   B
18 -Go 0.640% +0.64%   A-
19 18MATLAB 0.612% +0.09%   B
20 20Lua 0.493% +0.01%   B
Long term trends
The long term trends for the top 10 programming languages can be foundin theline diagram below.

Other programming languages
The complete top 50 of programming languages is listed below. Thisoverview ispublished unofficially, because it could be the case that we missed alanguage. Ifyou have the impression there is a programming language lacking, pleasenotify usattpci@tiobe.com.
PositionProgramming LanguageRatings
21 Transact-SQL 0.489%
22 ActionScript 0.485%
23 Ada 0.432%
24 COBOL 0.431%
25 RPG (OS/400) 0.415%
26 Bourne shell 0.415%
27 Fortran 0.415%
28 D 0.397%
29 JavaFX Script 0.395%
30 Logo 0.386%
31 Haskell 0.384%
32 S-lang 0.374%
33 Tcl/Tk 0.349%
34 NXT-G 0.347%
35 FoxPro/xBase 0.339%
36 Scratch 0.339%
37 Alice 0.331%
38 Forth 0.307%
39 PowerShell 0.303%
40 LabVIEW 0.294%
41 Groovy 0.280%
42 Prolog 0.269%
43 Caml/F# 0.253%
44 CL (OS/400) 0.246%
45 Scala 0.240%
46 Erlang 0.233%
47 Smalltalk 0.230%
48 ML 0.229%
49 C shell 0.224%
50 J 0.223%
The Next 50 Programming Languages
The following list of languages denotes #51 to #100. Since thedifferences arerelatively small, the programming languages are only listed (inalphabeticalorder).
ABC, Algol, APL, Applescript, Awk, Beta, cg, Clean, cT, Dylan, Eiffel, Euphoria, Factor, Falcon, Focus, Heron, Icon, IDL, Inform, Informix-4GL, Io, LabWindows/CVI, Lingo, LotusScript, LPC, MAD, Maple, Mathematica, MAX/MSP, Modula-2, Modula-3, MS-DOS batch, MUMPS, Natural, Occam, Oz, PL/I, Postscript, Progress, Q, R, Revolution, REXX, Sed, Seed7, SIGNAL, SPSS, VBScript, VHDL, XSLT
Very Long Term History
To see the bigger picture, please find the positions of the top 10programming languages from 4, 10 and 25 years ago in the table below.
Programming LanguagePosition
May 2010Position
May 2006Position
May 2000Position
May 1985
C 1 2 1 1
Java 2 1 5 -
C++ 3 3 2 10
PHP 4 4 31 -
(Visual) Basic 5 5 3 4
C# 6 7 21 -
Python 7 8 20 -
Perl 8 6 6 -
Delphi 9 10 11 -
Objective-C 10 45 - -
Programming Language Hall of Fame
The hall of fame listing all "Programming Language of the Year" awardwinners is shown below.
YearWinner
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 listed about categories oflanguages.Object-oriented statically typed languages are most popular for morethan 4years now.
CategoryRatings May 2010Delta May 2009
Object-Oriented Languages 54.6% -1.1%
Procedural Languages 40.7% +0.3%
Functional Languages 3.2% +0.4%
Logical Languages 1.6% +0.4%
CategoryRatings May 2010Delta May 2009
Statically Typed Languages 62.7% +4.5%
Dynamically Typed Languages 37.3% -4.5%

This Month's Changes in the Index
This month the following changes have been made to the definition ofthe index:
So far JavaFX Script was treated as a 100% logical language. Based on a discussion with Rowan Davies it is now 50% functional and 50% logical.
Robert Geva suggested OpenCL as new programming language to track. The OpenCL programming language was born at the end of 2008 and supports writing kernels that execute on OpenCL devices. OpenCL debuts at position 107 in the TIOBE index.
There are still lots of mails that need to be processed (especially after having been slashdotted once more recently). As soon as there is more time available your mail will be answered. Please be patient.
Bugs & Change Requests
This is the top 3 of most requested changes and bugs. If you have anysuggestions how to improve the index don't hesitate to send an e-mailtotpci@tiobe.com.
Add queries for other natural languages (apart from English). The idea is to start with the Chinese search engine Baidu.
Apart from " programming", also other queries such as "programming with " should be tried out.
There is a bug in the calculation of the max of all entries in a language group.
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.