December Headline: All time highs for C#, Objective-C and ActionScript
This month company-related programming languages are in the spotlight. Microsoft's C# language reached its highest ranking ever. Chances are high C# will become TIOBE's programming language of the year 2009. Another language that set a personal record was Apple's Objective-C. It is getting closer to the top 10 every month and has now officially reached status "A". But also Adobe's ActionScript had a high score. It re-entered the top 20. Other breaking news is that software giant Google released its first own programming language last month. The language is called Go. It will be monitored in the TIOBE index as of next month.
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!, 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.
| 1 | 1 |  |
Java | 17.061% | -2.31% | A |
| 2 | 2 | |
C | 16.285% | +0.12% | A |
| 3 | 4 |  |
PHP | 9.770% | +0.29% | A |
| 4 | 3 |  |
C++ | 9.175% | -1.72% | A |
| 5 | 5 | |
(Visual) Basic | 7.778% | -1.70% | A |
| 6 | 6 | |
C# | 6.258% | +1.61% | A |
| 7 | 7 | |
Python | 5.185% | +0.62% | A |
| 8 | 9 | |
JavaScript | 3.515% | +0.45% | A |
| 9 | 8 | |
Perl | 2.692% | -0.91% | A |
| 10 | 11 | |
Ruby | 2.653% | +0.34% | A |
| 11 | 10 | |
Delphi | 2.301% | -0.75% | A |
| 12 | 13 | |
PL/SQL | 1.494% | +0.35% | A |
| 13 | 35 | |
Objective-C | 1.159% | +1.00% | A |
| 14 | 14 | |
SAS | 0.911% | +0.07% | A |
| 15 | 19 | |
Lisp/Scheme | 0.881% | +0.37% | A-- |
| 16 | 17 | |
ABAP | 0.723% | +0.12% | A- |
| 17 | 15 | |
Pascal | 0.698% | +0.01% | B |
| 18 | 21 | |
ActionScript | 0.655% | +0.17% | B |
| 19 | 12 | |
D | 0.587% | -0.60% | B |
| 20 | 20 | |
Lua | 0.585% | +0.09% | B |
Long term trends
The long term trends for the top 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 [email protected].
| 21 | MATLAB | 0.580% |
| 22 | Scratch | 0.483% |
| 23 | COBOL | 0.462% |
| 24 | Fortran | 0.425% |
| 25 | Ada | 0.407% |
| 26 | Logo | 0.392% |
| 27 | FoxPro/xBase | 0.392% |
| 28 | Awk | 0.356% |
| 29 | S-lang | 0.330% |
| 30 | RPG (OS/400) | 0.329% |
| 31 | Alice | 0.326% |
| 32 | Transact-SQL | 0.309% |
| 33 | Scala | 0.294% |
| 34 | PowerShell | 0.286% |
| 35 | Prolog | 0.286% |
| 36 | Erlang | 0.277% |
| 37 | NXT-G | 0.277% |
| 38 | Tcl/Tk | 0.251% |
| 39 | Forth | 0.226% |
| 40 | Bourne shell | 0.213% |
| 41 | PL/I | 0.208% |
| 42 | Focus | 0.203% |
| 43 | Haskell | 0.190% |
| 44 | Groovy | 0.170% |
| 45 | MAX/MSP | 0.168% |
| 46 | LabVIEW | 0.168% |
| 47 | LabWindows/CVI | 0.164% |
| 48 | C shell | 0.151% |
| 49 | Smalltalk | 0.150% |
| 50 | JavaFX Script | 0.146% |
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).
- 4th Dimension/4D, ABC, AD, Algol, APL, Applescript, Beta, Boo, Caml/F#, cg, CL (OS/400), Clean, Clojure, Cobra, cT, Curl, Euphoria, Factor, Falcon, Fan, Icon, IDL, Inform, Informix-4GL, J, Lingo, MAD, Mathematica, ML, Modula-2, Modula-3, MOO, MUMPS, Natural, Occam, Oz, PowerBuilder, Progress, Q, R, REALbasic, Revolution, REXX, SIGNAL, SPSS, SuperCollider, VBScript, Verilog, VHDL, XSLT
December Newsflash - Brought to you by Paul Jansen
- This month the following changes have been made to the definition of the index:
- John Campbell suggested to add Unicon to Icon grouping
- Ze'ev Atlas observed that TSQL should be added to Transact-SQL grouping
- The SmallTalk grouping has been extended with VisualWorks, Pharo, Croquet thanks to Jason Ayers. He also suggested to start monitoring the EToys programming language
- Alejandro Quiroga Alsina asked an interesting question about how we count hits for groupings. The answer is added to the FAQ section of the TIOBE index
- There are still lots of mails that need to be processed. As soon as I have got some time I will answer them. Please be patient.
- To see the bigger picture, please find the positions of the top 10 programming languages from 4, 10 and 25 years ago in the table below.
Programming Language PositionDec 2009 PositionDec 2005 PositionDec 1999 PositionDec 1984 Java 1 1 3 - C 2 2 1 1 PHP 3 4 13 - C++ 4 3 2 11 (Visual) Basic 5 5 4 4 C# 6 7 20 - Python 7 8 28 - JavaScript 8 9 12 - Perl 9 6 5 - Ruby 10 24 - -
- The previous winners of the "Language of the Year" award are shown below.
Year Winner 2008 C 2007 Python 2006 Ruby 2005 Java 2004 PHP 2003 C++
- In the tables below some long term trends are listed about categories of languages. The object-oriented paradigm won another 2.4% to procedural languages in one month's time. The popularity of dynamically typed languages seems to stabilize (see trend diagram below).
Category Ratings Dec 2009 Delta Dec 2008 Object-Oriented Languages 55.1% -0.4% Procedural Languages 39.9% -0.5% Functional Languages 3.3% +0.6% Logical Languages 1.7% +0.3%
Category Ratings Dec 2009 Delta Dec 2008 Statically Typed Languages 57.7% -1.7% Dynamically Typed Languages 42.3% +1.7% 