TIOBE Programming Community Index for March 2009
March Headline: All time high for JavaScript, all time low for Perl
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!, 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 Mar 2009 | Position Mar 2008 | Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Mar 2009 | Delta Mar 2008 | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | Java | 19.797% | -1.69% | A | |
2 | 2 | C | 15.862% | +1.00% | A | |
3 | 5 | C++ | 10.357% | +1.08% | A | |
4 | 4 | PHP | 9.485% | -0.41% | A | |
5 | 3 | (Visual) Basic | 8.285% | -3.32% | A | |
6 | 7 | Python | 5.185% | +0.42% | A | |
7 | 8 | C# | 4.321% | -0.19% | A | |
8 | 10 | JavaScript | 3.607% | +1.27% | A | |
9 | 6 | Perl | 3.419% | -2.79% | A | |
10 | 9 | Delphi | 2.710% | -0.09% | A | |
11 | 11 | Ruby | 2.601% | +0.74% | A | |
12 | 12 | D | 1.809% | +0.62% | A | |
13 | 13 | PL/SQL | 1.042% | +0.06% | A | |
14 | 22 | Logo | 0.964% | +0.65% | A- | |
15 | 14 | SAS | 0.796% | -0.15% | A | |
16 | 17 | Pascal | 0.733% | +0.29% | A-- | |
17 | 29 | ABAP | 0.638% | +0.49% | B | |
18 | 26 | RPG (OS/400) | 0.585% | +0.41% | B | |
19 | 21 | ActionScript | 0.481% | +0.17% | B | |
20 | 18 | Lua | 0.480% | +0.09% | 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.
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 tpci@tiobe.com.
Position | Programming Language | Ratings |
---|---|---|
21 | COBOL | 0.464% |
22 | MATLAB | 0.458% |
23 | Lisp/Scheme | 0.452% |
24 | Falcon | 0.434% |
25 | FoxPro/xBase | 0.417% |
26 | Ada | 0.336% |
27 | Fortran | 0.323% |
28 | LabVIEW | 0.233% |
29 | PowerShell | 0.227% |
30 | Prolog | 0.213% |
31 | Erlang | 0.194% |
32 | Objective-C | 0.177% |
33 | Scratch | 0.174% |
34 | Haskell | 0.167% |
35 | Scala | 0.165% |
36 | Transact-SQL | 0.165% |
37 | ML | 0.159% |
38 | Alice | 0.150% |
39 | Awk | 0.148% |
40 | NXT-G | 0.148% |
41 | Focus | 0.143% |
42 | Groovy | 0.134% |
43 | Euphoria | 0.129% |
44 | Smalltalk | 0.128% |
45 | Progress | 0.123% |
46 | Bourne shell | 0.121% |
47 | CL (OS/400) | 0.108% |
48 | Tcl/Tk | 0.108% |
49 | Forth | 0.106% |
50 | Q | 0.104% |
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, APL, Applescript, bc, Beta, Boo, C shell, Caml/F#, cg, Clean, Clojure, cT, Curl, Dylan, Eiffel, Factor, Icon, IDL, Inform, Io, J, Lingo, MAD, Magic, Maple, Mathematica, MAX/MSP, MOO, MUMPS, Natural, Occam, Oz, PILOT, PL/I, Postscript, PowerBuilder, R, REALbasic, Revolution, REXX, SIGNAL, SPSS, SuperCollider, VBScript, Verilog, VHDL, XSLT
March Newsflash - Brought to you by Paul Jansen
- This month the following changes have been made to the index:
- The query for RPG (OS/400) has been extended with -role to avoid hits for "Role Playing Game" (thanks to Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf).
- The query for CH has been extended with +ChScite because Google returns too many false positives for +"CH programming".
- To see the bigger picture, please find the 5 years delta in the table below.
Position
Mar 2009Position
Mar 2004Delta in Position Programming Language Ratings
Mar 2009Delta
Mar 20041 1 Java 19.797% -3.38% 2 2 C 15.862% -3.07% 3 3 C++ 10.357% -4.14% 4 6 PHP 9.485% +1.85% 5 5 (Visual) Basic 8.285% -0.07% 6 9 Python 5.185% +4.17% 7 7 C# 4.321% +2.08% 8 8 JavaScript 3.607% +1.54% 9 4 Perl 3.419% -6.97% 10 10 Delphi 2.710% +1.92% 11 24 Ruby 2.601% +2.44% - The 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 with 55.9%. The popularity of dynamically typed languages seems to stabilize (see trend diagram below).
Category Ratings March 2009 Delta March 2008 Object-Oriented Languages 55.9% +1.2% Procedural Languages 39.7% -2.9% Functional Languages 3.3% +1.5% Logical Languages 1.1% +0.1%
Category Ratings March 2009 Delta March 2008 Statically Typed Languages 59.2% +2.2% Dynamically Typed Languages 40.8% -2.2%