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.