Smalltalk, the first pure object-oriented programming language ever, lost its position in the TIOBE top 50 this month. The same happened to the other well-known pure object-oriented language Eiffel a couple of months ago. This is probably part of the trend that languages are becoming more and more multiparadigm: both object-oriented and procedural with a functional flavor.
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, 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 Aug 2010 | Position Aug 2009 | Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Jul 2010 | Delta Jul 2009 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  |
Java | 17.994% | -1.53% | A |
| 2 | 2 | |
C | 17.866% | +0.65% | A |
| 3 | 3 | |
C++ | 9.658% | -0.84% | A |
| 4 | 4 | |
PHP | 9.180% | -0.21% | A |
| 5 | 5 | |
(Visual) Basic | 5.413% | -3.07% | A |
| 6 | 7 |
 |
C# | 4.986% | +0.54% | A |
| 7 | 6 |
 |
Python | 4.223% | -0.27% | A |
| 8 | 8 | |
Perl | 3.427% | -0.60% | A |
| 9 | 19 |
|
Objective-C | 3.150% | +2.54% | A |
| 10 | 11 |
|
Delphi | 2.428% | +0.09% | A |
| 11 | 9 |
|
JavaScript | 2.401% | -0.41% | A |
| 12 | 10 |
|
Ruby | 1.979% | -0.51% | A |
| 13 | 12 |
|
PL/SQL | 0.757% | -0.23% | A |
| 14 | 13 |
|
SAS | 0.715% | -0.10% | A |
| 15 | 20 |
|
MATLAB | 0.627% | +0.07% | B |
| 16 | 18 |
|
Lisp/Scheme/Clojure | 0.626% | 0.00% | B |
| 17 | 16 |
|
Pascal | 0.622% | -0.05% | B |
| 18 | 15 |
|
ABAP | 0.616% | -0.12% | B |
| 19 | 14 |
|
RPG (OS/400) | 0.606% | -0.15% | B |
| 20 | - |
| Go | 0.603% | 0.00% | 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 | PowerShell | 0.579% |
| 22 | Transact-SQL | 0.558% |
| 23 | Lua | 0.527% |
| 24 | D | 0.462% |
| 25 | FoxPro/xBase | 0.451% |
| 26 | ActionScript | 0.451% |
| 27 | S-lang | 0.414% |
| 28 | LabVIEW | 0.400% |
| 29 | Ada | 0.398% |
| 30 | Bourne shell | 0.395% |
| 31 | JavaFX Script | 0.390% |
| 32 | COBOL | 0.388% |
| 33 | NXT-G | 0.385% |
| 34 | Alice | 0.352% |
| 35 | Fortran | 0.351% |
| 36 | Haskell | 0.334% |
| 37 | Logo | 0.318% |
| 38 | Scratch | 0.316% |
| 39 | Forth | 0.270% |
| 40 | CL (OS/400) | 0.265% |
| 41 | Tcl/Tk | 0.261% |
| 42 | C shell | 0.255% |
| 43 | Prolog | 0.243% |
| 44 | Groovy | 0.234% |
| 45 | ML | 0.234% |
| 46 | cT | 0.233% |
| 47 | Caml/F# | 0.229% |
| 48 | Scala | 0.220% |
| 49 | Erlang | 0.219% |
| 50 | VHDL | 0.218% |
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 Aug 2010 | Position Aug 2005 | Position Aug 1995 | Position Aug 1985 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Java | 1 | 1 | - | - |
| C | 2 | 2 | 3 | 1 |
| C++ | 3 | 3 | 2 | 11 |
| PHP | 4 | 5 | - | - |
| (Visual) Basic | 5 | 6 | 1 | 4 |
| C# | 6 | 7 | - | - |
| Python | 7 | 8 | 24 | - |
| Perl | 8 | 4 | 8 | - |
| Objective-C | 9 | 43 | - | - |
| Delphi | 10 | 10 | - | - |
| Lisp/Scheme/Clojure | 16 | 14 | 6 | 2 |
| Ada | 29 | 17 | 7 | 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 |
|---|---|
| 2009 | Go |
| 2008 | C |
| 2007 | Python |
| 2006 | Ruby |
| 2005 | Java |
| 2004 | PHP |
| 2003 | C++ |
| Category | Ratings Aug 2010 | Delta Aug 2009 |
|---|---|---|
| Object-Oriented Languages | 54.9% | +0.6% |
| Procedural Languages | 40.5% | -1.0% |
| Functional Languages | 3.1% | +0.2% |
| Logical Languages | 1.5% | +0.2% |
| Category | Ratings Aug 2010 | Delta Aug 2009 |
|---|---|---|
| Statically Typed Languages | 62.2% | +2.5% |
| Dynamically Typed Languages | 37.8% | -2.5% |
This month the following changes have been made to the definition of the index:
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.
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: 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.
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.