TIOBE Programming Community Index for October 2011
October Headline: Java is losing ground despite its new version 7 release
Java lost almost 1% of its popularity in September. If this trend continues, C will be number one again next month. Other interesting observations are that both Objective-C and Transact-SQL scored new all time highs, Assembly reentered the top 20, Visual Basic.NET gained many places (from #39 to #25), while F# had a hard time (from #23 to #46).
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 Oct 2011 |
Position Oct 2010 |
Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Oct 2011 |
Delta Oct 2010 |
Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Java | 17.913% | -0.25% | A | |
| 2 | 2 | C | 17.707% | +0.53% | A | |
| 3 | 3 | C++ | 9.072% | -0.73% | A | |
| 4 | 4 | PHP | 6.818% | -1.51% | A | |
| 5 | 6 | C# | 6.723% | +1.76% | A | |
| 6 | 8 | Objective-C | 6.245% | +2.54% | A | |
| 7 | 5 | (Visual) Basic | 4.549% | -1.10% | A | |
| 8 | 7 | Python | 3.944% | -0.92% | A | |
| 9 | 9 | Perl | 2.432% | +0.12% | A | |
| 10 | 11 | JavaScript | 2.191% | +0.53% | A | |
| 11 | 10 | Ruby | 1.526% | -0.41% | A | |
| 12 | 12 | Delphi/Object Pascal | 1.104% | -0.45% | A | |
| 13 | 13 | Lisp | 1.031% | -0.05% | A | |
| 14 | 14 | Transact-SQL | 0.909% | +0.09% | A | |
| 15 | 23 | PL/SQL | 0.903% | +0.30% | A- | |
| 16 | 24 | Lua | 0.802% | +0.25% | A | |
| 17 | 16 | RPG (OS/400) | 0.757% | +0.05% | A-- | |
| 18 | 15 | Pascal | 0.721% | -0.05% | A | |
| 19 | - | Assembly* | 0.622% | - | B | |
| 20 | 17 | Ada | 0.609% | -0.09% | B |
*For more information about Assembly see the frequently asked questions
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 | MATLAB | 0.573% |
| 22 | D | 0.539% |
| 23 | Logo | 0.535% |
| 24 | SAS | 0.517% |
| 25 | Visual Basic .NET | 0.481% |
| 26 | COBOL | 0.476% |
| 27 | Scheme | 0.427% |
| 28 | C shell | 0.422% |
| 29 | R | 0.422% |
| 30 | NXT-G | 0.410% |
| 31 | Fortran | 0.381% |
| 32 | Go | 0.375% |
| 33 | ABAP | 0.369% |
| 34 | Erlang | 0.368% |
| 35 | Scratch | 0.356% |
| 36 | Haskell | 0.355% |
| 37 | ActionScript | 0.340% |
| 38 | Forth | 0.303% |
| 39 | Prolog | 0.288% |
| 40 | APL | 0.276% |
| 41 | Tcl | 0.261% |
| 42 | ML | 0.259% |
| 43 | Smalltalk | 0.258% |
| 44 | Alice | 0.253% |
| 45 | PL/I | 0.252% |
| 46 | F# | 0.243% |
| 47 | Ladder Logic | 0.238% |
| 48 | Q | 0.232% |
| 49 | Awk | 0.231% |
| 50 | Scala | 0.226% |
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, Bash, bc, BETA, BlitzMax, Bourne shell, CFML, cg, CL (OS/400), Clean, cT, Dylan, Eiffel, Factor, Free Pascal, Groovy, Icon, IDL, Io, J, JavaFX Script, JScript.NET, Korn shell, LabVIEW, Lingo, LPC, MAD, Magic, Max/MSP, MOO, MUMPS, NATURAL, Oberon, Occam, OpenCL, OpenEdge ABL, Oz, PostScript, PowerShell, REXX, S, SPSS, SuperCollider, VBScript, VHDL, X10, xBase, Z shell
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 Oct 2011 |
Position Oct 2006 |
Position Oct 1996 |
Position Oct 1986 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Java | 1 | 1 | 3 | - |
| C | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| C++ | 3 | 3 | 2 | 5 |
| PHP | 4 | 4 | - | - |
| C# | 5 | 8 | - | - |
| Objective-C | 6 | 38 | - | - |
| (Visual) Basic | 7 | 5 | 4 | 6 |
| Python | 8 | 7 | 27 | - |
| Perl | 9 | 6 | 7 | - |
| JavaScript | 10 | 9 | 16 | - |
| Lisp | 13 | 16 | 14 | 3 |
| Ada | 20 | 17 | 11 | 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 now.| Category | Ratings Oct 2011 | Delta Oct 2010 |
|---|---|---|
| Object-Oriented Languages | 55.9% | +0.7% |
| Procedural Languages | 38.0% | -1.5% |
| Functional Languages | 4.1% | +0.4% |
| Logical Languages | 2.0% | +0.4% |
| Category | Ratings Oct 2011 | Delta Oct 2010 |
|---|---|---|
| Statically Typed Languages | 64.6% | +1.7% |
| Dynamically Typed Languages | 35.4% | -1.7% |