February Headline: Programming Language D reaches Status “A”
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 world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! 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 Feb 2007 |
Position Feb 2006 |
Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Feb 2007 |
Delta Feb 2006 |
Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  |
Java | 18.978% | -3.45% | A |
| 2 | 2 | |
C | 16.104% | -2.23% | A |
| 3 | 3 | |
C++ | 10.768% | -0.53% | A |
| 4 | 5 |  |
PHP | 8.847% | -0.07% | A |
| 5 | 4 |  |
(Visual) Basic | 8.369% | -1.03% | A |
| 6 | 6 | |
Perl | 6.073% | -0.63% | A |
| 7 | 8 | |
Python | 3.566% | +0.90% | A |
| 8 | 7 | |
C# | 3.189% | -0.78% | A |
| 9 | 10 | |
JavaScript | 2.982% | +1.47% | A |
| 10 | 20 | |
Ruby | 2.528% | +2.12% | A |
| 11 | 11 | |
SAS | 2.326% | +1.13% | A |
| 12 | 9 | |
Delphi | 2.077% | +0.10% | A |
| 13 | 12 | |
PL/SQL | 1.628% | +0.66% | A |
| 14 | 21 | |
ABAP | 1.205% | +0.83% | A |
| 15 | 22 | |
D | 1.205% | +0.84% | A |
| 16 | 14 | |
Lisp/Scheme | 0.722% | +0.10% | A– |
| 17 | 17 | |
Ada | 0.661% | +0.15% | B |
| 18 | 13 | |
COBOL | 0.656% | -0.08% | B |
| 19 | 15 | |
Pascal | 0.596% | +0.05% | B |
| 20 | 36 | 16 * |
Transact-SQL | 0.543% | +0.38% |
Long term trends
The long term trends for the first 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 | Fortran | 0.518% |
| 22 | FoxPro/xBase | 0.517% |
| 23 | Awk | 0.406% |
| 24 | Prolog | 0.393% |
| 25 | IDL | 0.368% |
| 26 | MATLAB | 0.362% |
| 27 | Logo | 0.326% |
| 28 | ActionScript | 0.314% |
| 29 | Bash | 0.299% |
| 30 | ColdFusion | 0.286% |
| 31 | RPG | 0.266% |
| 32 | LabView | 0.234% |
| 33 | CL | 0.172% |
| 34 | Smalltalk | 0.166% |
| 35 | Forth | 0.158% |
| 36 | REXX | 0.158% |
| 37 | Maple | 0.156% |
| 38 | Tcl/Tk | 0.156% |
| 39 | S-lang | 0.140% |
| 40 | Icon | 0.130% |
| 41 | Haskell | 0.129% |
| 42 | Natural | 0.127% |
| 43 | VBScript | 0.120% |
| 44 | Lua | 0.114% |
| 45 | Q | 0.113% |
| 46 | OCaml | 0.110% |
| 47 | Objective-C | 0.108% |
| 48 | APL | 0.105% |
| 49 | Lingo | 0.105% |
| 50 | ML | 0.096% |
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, Algol, Alpha, Applescript, AspectJ, Avenue, Beta, Boo, cg, Ch, Clarion, Clean, Csh, cT, DC, Dylan, EGL, Eiffel, Erlang, Euphoria, F#, Felix, Focus, Groovy, Inform, Io, Limbo, LotusScript, MAD, Magic, Mathematica, Modula-2, MOO, MUMPS, Occam, Oz, PILOT, PL/I, Postscript, Powerbuilder, Progress, Rebol, Scala, Seed7, SIGNAL, SPSS, Verilog, VHDL, XSLT, Yorick
February Newsflash – Brought to you by Paul Jansen
- After discussion with Harry Smith, we decided to group all dBase dialects together (this also includes FoxPro and Clipper). The new entry is called FoxPro/xBase. The complete set consists of FoxPro, Fox Pro, VFP, dBase, dBaseIII, dBaseIV, dBaseV, Clipper, Flagship, QuickSilver, Recital, xBase++, and xHarbour.
- This month we started to monitor the following languages: Gambas, JADE, Pliant, Revolution, and Squirrel. They are not in the top 100 yet. The highest position is for Revolution in 117th place.
- At the moment SAS, ABAP, and Transact-SQL are going extremely strong with all time highs, but I have a gut feeling this is not the truth. This has bugged me now for at least half a year. In the beginning I thought this was thanks to push actions (such as the ones for ColdFusion and FoxPro in the recent past) but this does not seem the case. A couple of weeks ago I found the real cause. The high ratings of these three languages are due to their hits for Google Groups. SAS counts for 7.5%, ABAP for 3.4% and Transact-SQL for 1.3% of the total amount of Google Groups hits. The explanation for this is quite simple. Google Groups is getting less popular. For instance, the programming language C, which is quite popular in Google Groups went down from 12,200 to 9,870 hits in one year time. Usually, the number of hits increases for all languages (even the ones in decline) for the search engines we use, because the number of documents per search engine per year grows. Now that the number of hits on Google Groups is going down, the reliability of these figures is also going down. Some old communities remain posting on Google Groups whereas the hot languages move their discussions to Google Blogs. As a consequence, the old communities have more shares in Google Groups and because the population is low the Google Groups hits have a relatively higher impact. To compensate for this, we decided to lower the weight of Google Groups from 20% to 18% from this month on. If the results will remain dissatisfying, the weight of Google Groups will be lowered further. It could even be the case that we remove Google Groups entirely in the end. Let me know your opinion about this!
- If you click on a language in the top 20, you will see the individual trend for this language. A feature provided to you by Nick de Jong.
- In the tables below some long term trends are listed about categories of languages. The tables show that dynamically typed object-oriented languages are still becoming more popular.
Category Ratings Feb 2007 Delta Feb 2006 Object-Oriented Languages 51.8% +0.5% Procedural Languages 45.7% -1.4% Logical Languages 1.7% +0.8% Functional Languages 0.8% +0.2% Category Ratings Feb 2007 Delta Feb 2006 Statically Typed Languages 57.6% -3.7% Dynamically Typed Languages 42.4% +3.7%
Original post: http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
