TIOBE Programming Community Index for April 2011

TIOBE Programming Community Index for April 2011

April Headline: Lua is approaching the top 10 of the TIOBE index

Lua shows a strong trend upwards the last couple of months. Most applications nowadays in the top 10 of the iPhone app store are using Lua to define the application logic, including the popular Angry Birds app.

Other interesting moves in the TIOBE index this month can be found outside the top 20. This is due to the fact that the index uses 7 different search engines as of this month. Some promising languages lost many positions. Most striking examples of this are NXT-G (down from 19 to 54) and Groovy (from 25 to 65).

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, 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 Apr 2011	Position Apr 2010	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings Apr 2011	Delta Apr 2010	Status
1	2		Java	19.043%	+0.99%	A
2	1		C	16.162%	-1.90%	A
3	3		C++	9.225%	-0.48%	A
4	6		C#	7.185%	+2.75%	A
5	4		PHP	6.584%	-3.08%	A
6	7		Python	4.931%	+0.73%	A
7	5		(Visual) Basic	4.682%	-1.71%	A
8	11		Objective-C	4.386%	+2.10%	A
9	8		Perl	1.991%	-1.56%	A
10	10		JavaScript	1.513%	-0.96%	A
11	12		Ruby	1.482%	-0.74%	A
12	20		Lua	1.035%	+0.51%	A
13	9		Delphi	1.034%	-1.68%	A
14	-		Assembly	0.967%	0.00%	A
15	23		Lisp	0.934%	+0.45%	A
16	32		Ada	0.768%	+0.41%	A
17	16		Pascal	0.713%	+0.06%	A
18	21		Transact-SQL	0.583%	+0.08%	B
19	-		Scheme	0.581%	0.00%	B
20	15		Go	0.557%	-0.15%	A--

* See FAQ for more information about Assembly (which also holds for Scheme)

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].

Position	Programming Language	Ratings
21	RPG (OS/400)	0.539%
22	Logo	0.535%
23	SAS	0.492%
24	PL/SQL	0.457%
25	MATLAB	0.457%
26	Scratch	0.442%
27	R	0.423%
28	Q	0.403%
29	Alice	0.394%
30	ABAP	0.389%
31	Forth	0.388%
32	Fortran	0.385%
33	D	0.380%
34	F#	0.379%
35	Visual Basic .NET	0.342%
36	ML	0.341%
37	Icon	0.340%
38	C shell	0.339%
39	Natural	0.339%
40	COBOL	0.336%
41	PowerBasic	0.332%
42	PL/I	0.318%
43	Haskell	0.307%
44	AD	0.286%
45	Progress 4GL	0.283%
46	Erlang	0.271%
47	ActionScript	0.268%
48	APL	0.260%
49	TOM	0.253%
50	SIGNAL	0.249%

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).

• (Visual) FoxPro, ABC, Algol, Alpha, Arc, ATLAS, Avenue, Awk, Bash, bc, Beta, Boo, Bourne shell, CFML, cg, CL (OS/400), Clean, cT, Dylan, Eiffel, Factor, Groovy, Inform, Io, J, JavaFX Script, Korn shell, LabVIEW, MAD, Magic, Maple, Mercury, MUMPS, NXT-G, Oberon, Object Pascal, Objective Caml, Occam, OpenCL, Oz, PILOT, PowerShell, Prolog, Revolution, S, Scala, Smalltalk, Spark, Standard ML, Tcl

Very Long Term History

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 Apr 2011	Position Apr 2006	Position Apr 1996	Position Apr 1986
Java	1	1	-	-
C	2	2	1	1
C++	3	3	2	5
C#	4	7	-	-
PHP	5	4	-	-
Python	6	8	-	-
(Visual) Basic	7	5	3	6
Objective-C	8	43	-	-
Perl	9	6	8	-
JavaScript	10	9	-	-
Lisp	15	14	4	3
Ada	16	17	15	2

Programming Language Hall of Fame

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
2010	Python
2009	Go
2008	C
2007	Python
2006	Ruby
2005	Java
2004	PHP
2003	C++

Categories of Programming Languages

In the tables below some long term trends are shown about categories of languages. Object-oriented statically typed languages have been most popular for more than 5 years.

Category	Ratings Apr 2011	Delta Apr 2010
Object-Oriented Languages	58.8%	+4.8%
Procedural Languages	36.4%	-5.2%
Functional Languages	3.7%	+0.6%
Logical Languages	1.2%	-0.3%

Category	Ratings Apr 2011	Delta Apr 2010
Statically Typed Languages	65.5%	+4.1%
Dynamically Typed Languages	34.5%	-4.1%

This Month's Changes in the Index

This month the following changes have been made to the definition of the index:

• The programming language "PowerBasic" is tracked from this month on. This was a suggestion from George Bleck. The language enters the index at position 41.
• There are lots of mails that still need to be processed. As soon as there is more time available your mail will be answered. Please be patient.