After having been a close runner-up for 2 years, Objective-C has won the TIOBE programming language award of 2011. This award is given to the programming language that gained most market share in 2011. The market share of Objective-C is 3.91% higher than it was in January 2011. The major cause of this is the continuing success of the iPhone and the iPad, which both are mainly implemented in Objective-C.
What were the other interesting moves in the TIOBE index in 2011? Apart from Objective-C also C# made a considerable leap forward (+2.55%), followed by C (+1.15%) and JavaScript (+0.73%). On the other hand, 2011 was a bad year for last year winner Python (-3.05%) and PHP (-2.13%). What about 2012? Is there any new programming language to hit the top 10 in 2012? We doubt so. Possible candidates are F#, Groovy and R. For instance, the R language entered the top 20 this month for the first time. This language for statisticians is becoming the major programming language in its field.
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, Amazon, 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 Jan 2012 | Position Jan 2011 | Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Jan 2012 | Delta Jan 2011 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  |
Java | 17.479% | -0.29% | A |
| 2 | 2 | |
C | 16.976% | +1.15% | A |
| 3 | 6 |
 |
C# | 8.781% | +2.55% | A |
| 4 | 3 |
 |
C++ | 8.063% | -0.72% | A |
| 5 | 8 |
|
Objective-C | 6.919% | +3.91% | A |
| 6 | 4 |
|
PHP | 5.710% | -2.13% | A |
| 7 | 7 | |
(Visual) Basic | 4.531% | -1.34% | A |
| 8 | 5 |
|
Python | 3.218% | -3.05% | A |
| 9 | 9 | |
Perl | 2.773% | -0.08% | A |
| 10 | 11 |
|
JavaScript | 2.322% | +0.73% | A |
| 11 | 12 |
|
Delphi/Object Pascal | 1.576% | +0.29% | A |
| 12 | 10 |
|
Ruby | 1.441% | -0.34% | A |
| 13 | 13 | |
Lisp | 1.111% | +0.00% | A |
| 14 | 14 | |
Pascal | 0.798% | -0.12% | A |
| 15 | 17 |
|
Transact-SQL | 0.772% | +0.01% | A |
| 16 | 24 |
|
PL/SQL | 0.709% | +0.15% | A |
| 17 | 20 |
|
Ada | 0.634% | -0.05% | B |
| 18 | 39 |
|
Logo | 0.632% | +0.29% | B |
| 19 | 25 |
|
R | 0.609% | +0.07% | B |
| 20 | 21 |
|
Lua | 0.559% | -0.08% | 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 | Assembly | 0.550% |
| 22 | C shell | 0.528% |
| 23 | MATLAB | 0.515% |
| 24 | Visual Basic .NET | 0.482% |
| 25 | NXT-G | 0.478% |
| 26 | Go | 0.474% |
| 27 | Fortran | 0.434% |
| 28 | ABAP | 0.418% |
| 29 | Scheme | 0.415% |
| 30 | RPG (OS/400) | 0.402% |
| 31 | COBOL | 0.393% |
| 32 | SAS | 0.339% |
| 33 | F# | 0.338% |
| 34 | Scratch | 0.334% |
| 35 | ActionScript | 0.326% |
| 36 | Groovy | 0.322% |
| 37 | D | 0.320% |
| 38 | Forth | 0.318% |
| 39 | Erlang | 0.304% |
| 40 | PL/I | 0.303% |
| 41 | Haskell | 0.301% |
| 42 | Ladder Logic | 0.299% |
| 43 | Prolog | 0.292% |
| 44 | ML | 0.291% |
| 45 | Q | 0.276% |
| 46 | OpenEdge ABL | 0.274% |
| 47 | Standard ML | 0.274% |
| 48 | Smalltalk | 0.260% |
| 49 | Tcl | 0.259% |
| 50 | APL | 0.245% |
The following list of languages denotes #51 to #100. Since the differences are relatively small, the programming languages are only listed (in alphabetical order).
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 Jan 2012 | Position Jan 2007 | Position Jan 1997 | Position Jan 1987 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Java | 1 | 1 | 5 | - |
| C | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| C# | 3 | 7 | - | - |
| C++ | 4 | 3 | 2 | 7 |
| Objective-C | 5 | 46 | - | - |
| PHP | 6 | 5 | - | - |
| (Visual) Basic | 7 | 4 | 3 | 5 |
| Python | 8 | 8 | 26 | - |
| Perl | 9 | 6 | 6 | - |
| JavaScript | 10 | 9 | 25 | - |
| Lisp | 13 | 16 | 16 | 2 |
| Ada | 17 | 17 | 12 | 3 |
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 |
|---|---|
| 2011 | Objective-C |
| 2010 | Python |
| 2009 | Go |
| 2008 | C |
| 2007 | Python |
| 2006 | Ruby |
| 2005 | Java |
| 2004 | PHP |
| 2003 | C++ |
| Category | Ratings Jan 2012 | Delta Jan 2011 |
|---|---|---|
| Object-Oriented Languages | 57.1% | +1.8% |
| Procedural Languages | 36.8% | -2.7% |
| Functional Languages | 4.3% | +0.6% |
| Logical Languages | 1.8% | +0.3% |
| Category | Ratings Jan 2012 | Delta Jan 2011 |
|---|---|---|
| Statically Typed Languages | 71.4% | +3.5% |
| Dynamically Typed Languages | 28.6% | -3.5% |
This month the following changes have been made to the definition of the index:
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.
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.
A: Yes, the only condition is to 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 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.
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 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.