TIOBE Programming Community Index for August 2009

August Headline: Objective-C enters top 20

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.

Position
Aug 2009 Position
Aug 2008 Delta in Position Programming Language Ratings
Aug 2009 Delta
Aug 2008 Status

1	1		Java	19.527%	-2.04%	A
2	2		C	17.220%	+1.04%	A
3	4		C++	10.501%	+0.44%	A
4	5		PHP	9.390%	+0.04%	A
5	3		(Visual) Basic	8.486%	-2.37%	A
6	6		Python	4.489%	-0.49%	A
7	8		C#	4.443%	+0.75%	A
8	7		Perl	4.028%	-0.67%	A
9	10		JavaScript	2.812%	-0.08%	A
10	9		Ruby	2.490%	-0.43%	A
11	11		Delphi	2.337%	-0.39%	A
12	13		PL/SQL	0.982%	+0.30%	A
13	14		SAS	0.817%	+0.27%	A
14	27		RPG (OS/400)	0.752%	+0.52%	A
15	26		ABAP	0.739%	+0.51%	A
16	16		Pascal	0.675%	+0.26%	A-
17	12		D	0.662%	-0.69%	B
18	17		Lisp/Scheme	0.630%	+0.25%	B
19	41		Objective-C	0.612%	+0.51%	B
20	25		MATLAB	0.560%	+0.32%	B

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Long term trends

The long term trends for the top 10 programming languages can be found in the line diagram below.

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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 [e-mail].

Position Programming Language Ratings

21	Lua	0.485%
22	ActionScript	0.471%
23	COBOL	0.441%
24	Logo	0.423%
25	Ada	0.416%
26	Fortran	0.400%
27	Scratch	0.334%
28	FoxPro/xBase	0.319%
29	Erlang	0.310%
30	Transact-SQL	0.294%
31	Scala	0.262%
32	Prolog	0.260%
33	Haskell	0.233%
34	ML	0.232%
35	PowerShell	0.227%
36	Alice	0.221%
37	Awk	0.216%
38	Smalltalk	0.183%
39	LabVIEW	0.173%
40	Focus	0.165%
41	Forth	0.150%
42	J	0.143%
43	Tcl/Tk	0.134%
44	JavaFX Script	0.129%
45	NXT-G	0.125%
46	Caml/F#	0.123%
47	CL (OS/400)	0.117%
48	Groovy	0.117%
49	C shell	0.109%
50	APL	0.107%

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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, AD, Algol, Alpha, Applescript, Beta, Boo, Bourne shell, cg, Clean, Clojure, Cobra, cT, Curl, Dylan, Eiffel, Euphoria, Factor, Falcon, Fan, Icon, IDL, Inform, Io, Lingo, MAD, Magic, Maple, Mathematica, MAX/MSP, MOO, MUMPS, Natural, Occam, Oz, PL/I, Postscript, Progress, Q, R, Revolution, REXX, S-lang, SIGNAL, SPSS, Squirrel, SuperCollider, VBScript, VHDL, XSLT

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August Newsflash - Brought to you by Paul Jansen

• 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 Position
  Aug 2009 Position
  Aug 2005 Position
  Aug 1999 Position
  Aug 1984

  Java	1	1	3	-
  C	2	2	1	1
  C++	3	3	2	11
  PHP	4	5	-	-
  (Visual) Basic	5	6	5	4
  Python	6	8	-	-
  C#	7	7	19	-
  Perl	8	4	4	-
  JavaScript	9	9	10	-
  Ruby	10	25	-	-

  
  
• 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 is still very high at 54.0%. The popularity of dynamically typed languages seems to stabilize (see trend diagram below).
  
  Category Ratings Aug 2009 Delta Aug 2008

  Object-Oriented Languages	54.0%	-2.4%
  Procedural Languages	42.0%	+1.3%
  Functional Languages	2.8%	+0.8%
  Logical Languages	1.2%	+0.4%

  
  
  Category Ratings Aug 2009 Delta Aug 2008

  Statically Typed Languages	59.8%	+1.1%
  Dynamically Typed Languages	40.2%	-1.1%

  

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Frequently Asked Questions

• Q: What definition of programming languages has been used?
  
  

  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.

• Q: How are dialects of languages grouped?

  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!).

• Q: Am I allowed to show the TIOBE index in my weblog/presentation/publication?

  A: This is OK provided that you refer to its original source: www.tiobe.com.

• Q: I would like to have the complete data set of the TIOBE index. Is this possible?

  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 [e-mail] for more information.

• Q: What happened to Java in April 2004? Did you change your methodology?

  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.

• Q: Why is YouTube used as a search engine for the TIOBE index?

  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.