TIOBE Programming Community Index for July 2009
July Headline: Objective-C on its way to top 20 thanks to success iPhone
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 Jul 2009 | Position Jul 2008 | Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Jul 2009 | Delta Jul 2008 | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | Java | 20.452% | -0.89% | A | |
2 | 2 | C | 17.319% | +1.37% | A | |
3 | 3 | C++ | 10.419% | -0.27% | A | |
4 | 5 | PHP | 9.269% | -0.26% | A | |
5 | 4 | (Visual) Basic | 7.789% | -2.66% | A | |
6 | 8 | C# | 4.540% | +0.54% | A | |
7 | 7 | Python | 4.435% | -0.54% | A | |
8 | 6 | Perl | 4.200% | -0.93% | A | |
9 | 9 | JavaScript | 3.513% | +0.76% | A | |
10 | 10 | Ruby | 2.567% | -0.17% | A | |
11 | 11 | Delphi | 1.998% | -0.01% | A | |
12 | 13 | PL/SQL | 0.891% | +0.16% | A | |
13 | 14 | SAS | 0.794% | +0.17% | A | |
14 | 24 | RPG (OS/400) | 0.740% | +0.41% | A | |
15 | 16 | Pascal | 0.707% | +0.27% | A | |
16 | 26 | ABAP | 0.703% | +0.44% | A- | |
17 | 20 | Lisp/Scheme | 0.607% | +0.22% | B | |
18 | 12 | D | 0.593% | -0.63% | B | |
19 | 18 | Lua | 0.531% | +0.12% | B | |
20 | 27 | MATLAB | 0.512% | +0.26% | B |
<script type="text/javascript"></script>
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 | Objective-C | 0.509% |
22 | ActionScript | 0.425% |
23 | Fortran | 0.400% |
24 | COBOL | 0.399% |
25 | Logo | 0.394% |
26 | Ada | 0.394% |
27 | FoxPro/xBase | 0.338% |
28 | PowerShell | 0.327% |
29 | Scratch | 0.274% |
30 | Transact-SQL | 0.271% |
31 | Prolog | 0.243% |
32 | Scala | 0.228% |
33 | Erlang | 0.203% |
34 | Haskell | 0.198% |
35 | ML | 0.196% |
36 | LabVIEW | 0.191% |
37 | Focus | 0.155% |
38 | Awk | 0.153% |
39 | Smalltalk | 0.150% |
40 | Forth | 0.145% |
41 | Alice | 0.142% |
42 | J | 0.133% |
43 | Tcl/Tk | 0.129% |
44 | JavaFX Script | 0.129% |
45 | Caml/F# | 0.118% |
46 | NXT-G | 0.118% |
47 | Groovy | 0.114% |
48 | APL | 0.111% |
49 | Bourne shell | 0.109% |
50 | CL (OS/400) | 0.107% |
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, C shell, cg, Clean, Cobra, cT, Curl, Dylan, Eiffel, Euphoria, Factor, Fan, Icon, IDL, Inform, Io, Lingo, MAD, Magic, Maple, Mathematica, MAX/MSP, MOO, MUMPS, Natural, Oberon, Occam, Oz, PL/I, Postscript, PowerBuilder, Progress, Q, R, Revolution, REXX, S-lang, SIGNAL, SPSS, SuperCollider, VBScript, Verilog, VHDL, XSLT
July Newsflash - Brought to you by Paul Jansen
- Thanks to sponsor Versant we have obtained data for the TIOBE index back to 1984. The methodology we used is to scan all Usenet newsgroups and take the 3 years' average. The results of this interesting survey will be soon published and integrated in the TIOBE index. In order to show already some results we have added a 10 years and 25 years delta column to the "bigger picture" table below.
- After being around the 50th position for many years, Objective-C suddenly gains popularity. This is thanks to the fact that this programming language is used to write applications for the iPhone. Another language that is claiming a high position is JavaFX Script. It jumped from 72 to 44 in one month's time.
- This month the following changes have been made to the index:
- The grouping of the programming language Progress has been improved considerably thanks to Randall Harper.
- Georg Wrede pointed out that it is better not to take a 5 years difference in the bigger picture below, because 5 years ago the TIOBE index appeared to be very volatile for half a year. So we changed the 5 years column in a 4 years column for the time being.
- 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
July 2009Position
July 2005Position
July 1999Position
July 1984Java 1 2 4 - C 2 1 1 1 C++ 3 3 2 - PHP 4 4 - - (Visual) Basic 5 6 3 5 C# 6 7 19 - Python 7 8 - - Perl 8 5 5 - JavaScript 9 9 12 - Ruby 10 27 - - - 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 54.2%, but functional languages grow fastest. The popularity of dynamically typed languages seems to stabilize (see trend diagram below).
Category Ratings July 2009 Delta July 2008 Object-Oriented Languages 54.2% -1.7% Procedural Languages 41.8% +0.7% Functional Languages 2.8% +0.7% Logical Languages 1.1% +0.2%
Category Ratings July 2009 Delta July 2008 Statically Typed Languages 60.2% +1.8% Dynamically Typed Languages 39.8% -1.8%