TIOBE Programming Community Index for July 2011

July Headline: No competition for Objective-C to become language of the year

We are half way 2011 and there is one language that stands out if we look at the percentage of gained market shared in one year. That is Objective-C with +2.68%. Runner up is Lua with "only" +1.04%. So it is very likely that Objective-C will become TIOBE's programming language of the year 2011. This award will be given in January 2012.

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
Jul 2011		Position
Jul 2010		Delta in PositionProgramming LanguageRatings
Jul 2011		Delta
Jul 2010		Status
11Java19.251%+0.58%  A
22C17.280%-1.20%  A
33C++9.017%-1.45%  A
45C#6.221%+0.49%  A
54PHP6.179%-2.39%  A
69Objective-C5.181%+2.68%  A
76(Visual) Basic5.106%-0.41%  A
87Python3.583%-0.63%  A
98Perl2.328%-0.77%  A
1010JavaScript2.242%-0.19%  A
1119Lua1.572%+1.04%  A
1212Ruby1.325%-0.66%  A
1316Lisp0.906%+0.28%  A
1411Delphi/Object Pascal0.887%-1.44%  A
1524Transact-SQL0.802%+0.34%  A--
1615Pascal0.668%+0.03%  A-
17-Assembly*0.618%-  B
1822RPG (OS/400)0.559%+0.09%  B
1928Ada0.549%+0.17%  B
2046C shell0.545%+0.33%  B


* See FAQ for more information about Assembly


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.

PositionProgramming LanguageRatings
21PL/SQL0.544%
22Logo0.536%
23Scheme0.523%
24F#0.492%
25Visual Basic .NET0.484%
26MATLAB0.452%
27D0.443%
28SAS0.414%
29Q0.411%
30NXT-G0.389%
31Scratch0.378%
32Go0.374%
33R0.359%
34Forth0.358%
35Fortran0.350%
36ML0.337%
37Alice0.337%
38NATURAL0.326%
39Clean0.313%
40ActionScript0.311%
41Icon0.307%
42ABAP0.299%
43Haskell0.294%
44PL/I0.285%
45OpenEdge ABL0.277%
46COBOL0.263%
47APL0.259%
48Smalltalk0.250%
49Erlang0.231%
50Scala0.230%

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, 4th Dimension/4D, ABC, Algol, Arc, ATLAS, Avenue, Awk, Bash, bc, BETA, Boo, Bourne shell, CFML, cg, CL (OS/400), Cobra, cT, Dylan, Eiffel, Factor, Groovy, Inform, Io, J, JScript.NET, Korn shell, LabVIEW, Ladder Logic, MAD, Magic, Maple, Mercury, Monkey, MOO, MUMPS, Oberon, OpenCL, Oz, PILOT, PowerShell, Prolog, Revolution, S, SIGNAL, Standard ML, Tcl, TOM, VBScript, VHDL

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 LanguagePosition
Jul 2011		Position
Jul 2006		Position
Jul 1996		Position
Jul 1986
Java116-
C2211
C++3525
C#47--
PHP54--
Objective-C638--
(Visual) Basic7336
Python8825-
Perl965-
JavaScript10921-
Lisp131583
Ada1914112

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.
 

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

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.



CategoryRatings Jul 2011Delta Jul 2010
Object-Oriented Languages55.9%+0.6%
Procedural Languages38.1%-2.1%
Functional Languages4.4%+1.4%
Logical Languages1.6%+0.2%


CategoryRatings Jul 2011Delta Jul 2010
Statically Typed Languages65.2%+1.3%
Dynamically Typed Languages34.8%-1.3%


This Month's Changes in the Index

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

  • Chris Riordon observed that Fortran was missing from the programming language definition page. It has been added now.
  • The confidence of the MAD programming language has been set to 50%.
  • 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.