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!, 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 May 2008 | Position May 2007 | Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings May 2008 | Delta May 2007 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  |
Java | 20.176% | +1.04% | A |
| 2 | 2 | |
C | 15.292% | +0.14% | A |
| 3 | 5 |
 |
(Visual) Basic | 10.782% | +2.35% | A |
| 4 | 4 | |
PHP | 10.637% | +1.90% | A |
| 5 | 3 |
 |
C++ | 10.484% | +0.37% | A |
| 6 | 6 | |
Perl | 5.869% | -0.28% | A |
| 7 | 7 | |
Python | 4.613% | +0.83% | A |
| 8 | 8 | |
C# | 3.963% | +0.31% | A |
| 9 | 10 |
|
Ruby | 2.851% | +0.22% | A |
| 10 | 11 |
|
Delphi | 2.641% | +0.51% | A |
| 11 | 9 |
|
JavaScript | 2.411% | -0.66% | A |
| 12 | 14 |
|
D | 1.314% | -0.03% | A |
| 13 | 12 |
|
SAS | 0.738% | -1.34% | A- |
| 14 | 13 |
|
PL/SQL | 0.625% | -1.35% | B |
| 15 | 22 |
|
Pascal | 0.498% | -0.05% | B |
| 16 | 16 | |
Lisp/Scheme | 0.449% | -0.25% | B |
| 17 | 17 | |
Ada | 0.431% | -0.25% | B |
| 18 | 20 |
|
COBOL | 0.411% | -0.22% | B |
| 19 | 23 |
|
Lua | 0.393% | -0.12% | B |
| 20 | 18 |
|
FoxPro/xBase | 0.385% | -0.25% | B |
The long term trends for the top 10 programming languages can be found in the line diagram below.
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 | Logo | 0.376% |
| 22 | Fortran | 0.334% |
| 23 | ActionScript | 0.293% |
| 24 | RPG (OS/400) | 0.279% |
| 25 | MATLAB | 0.271% |
| 26 | Prolog | 0.241% |
| 27 | ABAP | 0.232% |
| 28 | Awk | 0.211% |
| 29 | LabVIEW | 0.182% |
| 30 | PL/I | 0.143% |
| 31 | Smalltalk | 0.138% |
| 32 | Haskell | 0.137% |
| 33 | Groovy | 0.131% |
| 34 | Tcl/Tk | 0.118% |
| 35 | Bash | 0.117% |
| 36 | PowerShell | 0.116% |
| 37 | CL (OS/400) | 0.110% |
| 38 | Erlang | 0.110% |
| 39 | ML | 0.110% |
| 40 | Forth | 0.102% |
| 41 | Transact-SQL | 0.102% |
| 42 | Lingo | 0.099% |
| 43 | REXX | 0.096% |
| 44 | Caml | 0.090% |
| 45 | Natural | 0.090% |
| 46 | Objective-C | 0.083% |
| 47 | Euphoria | 0.083% |
| 48 | Icon | 0.076% |
| 49 | Io | 0.074% |
| 50 | Scala | 0.073% |
The following list of languages denotes #51 to #100. Since the differences are relatively small, the programming languages are only listed (in alphabetical order).
| Category | Ratings May 2008 | Delta May 2007 |
|---|---|---|
| Object-Oriented Languages | 55.4% | +3.0% |
| Procedural Languages | 42.4% | -0.9% |
| Functional Languages | 1.6% | -0.5% |
| Logical Languages | 0.6% | -1.5% |
| Category | Ratings May 2008 | Delta May 2007 |
|---|---|---|
| Statically Typed Languages | 57.3% | +0.7% |
| Dynamically Typed Languages | 42.7% | -0.7% |
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.
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!).
A: This is OK provided that you refer to its original source: www.tiobe.com.
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.
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.
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.
Don't blame Richard Bremner for removing ColdFusion from the TIOBE index. The TIOBE company made this decision based on Richard's suggestion. The many, many mails from the ColdFusion community that this is plain wrong, forced us to reconsider this. On second thought ColdFusion is not a programming language, but CFML definitely is. CFML is tagged like HTML and XML, but unlike HTML and XML, it is Turing complete. So CFML counts as a language. It will be added to the list as a separate entity from next month on. Unfortunately, CFML is at position 135 if the TIOBE index would have been published today. In order to compensate for the harm done to the ColdFusion community we are thinking about putting an idea of Matthew Drayer into practice: having another index that measures the popularity of web application frameworks. This includes ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails, Django, Grails, etc. We think this is an index a lot of people are waiting for.