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The difference between the number 1 and 2 of the TIOBE index is getting smaller. C is only a little over 1% behind Java now. Last time C and Java were so close was in 2005. Both languages show a long-term downtrend, but Java’s downtrend appears to be steeper. In two months’ time TIOBE will announce the programming language of the year 2009. Candidates so far are: C, C#, PHP and may be even Objective-C.
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 Nov 2009 |
Position Nov 2008 |
Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Nov 2009 |
Delta Nov 2008 |
Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  |
Java | 18.373% | -1.93% | A |
| 2 | 2 | |
C | 17.315% | +2.04% | A |
| 3 | 5 |  |
PHP | 10.176% | +1.24% | A |
| 4 | 3 |  |
C++ | 10.002% | -0.36% | A |
| 5 | 4 | |
(Visual) Basic | 8.171% | -1.10% | A |
| 6 | 7 | |
C# | 5.346% | +1.32% | A |
| 7 | 6 | |
Python | 4.672% | -0.47% | A |
| 8 | 9 | |
Perl | 3.490% | -0.39% | A |
| 9 | 10 | |
JavaScript | 2.916% | -0.01% | A |
| 10 | 11 | |
Ruby | 2.404% | -0.47% | A |
| 11 | 8 | |
Delphi | 2.127% | -1.88% | A |
| 12 | 13 | |
PL/SQL | 0.908% | -0.03% | A |
| 13 | 38 | |
Objective-C | 0.893% | +0.74% | A- |
| 14 | 14 | |
SAS | 0.816% | +0.09% | A |
| 15 | 16 | |
Pascal | 0.654% | +0.14% | A– |
| 16 | 15 | |
ABAP | 0.643% | +0.07% | A– |
| 17 | 21 | |
Lisp/Scheme | 0.618% | +0.15% | B |
| 18 | 22 | |
MATLAB | 0.611% | +0.15% | B |
| 19 | 20 | |
Lua | 0.544% | +0.07% | B |
| 20 | 12 | |
D | 0.543% | -0.90% | B |
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 | ActionScript | 0.519% |
| 22 | COBOL | 0.430% |
| 23 | Transact-SQL | 0.412% |
| 24 | FoxPro/xBase | 0.379% |
| 25 | Fortran | 0.376% |
| 26 | Logo | 0.361% |
| 27 | Scratch | 0.346% |
| 28 | Alice | 0.329% |
| 29 | Ada | 0.305% |
| 30 | S-lang | 0.292% |
| 31 | RPG (OS/400) | 0.285% |
| 32 | Erlang | 0.261% |
| 33 | PowerShell | 0.259% |
| 34 | Scala | 0.244% |
| 35 | Awk | 0.243% |
| 36 | Prolog | 0.234% |
| 37 | NXT-G | 0.234% |
| 38 | Tcl/Tk | 0.221% |
| 39 | Focus | 0.209% |
| 40 | LabWindows/CVI | 0.193% |
| 41 | Haskell | 0.183% |
| 42 | PL/I | 0.177% |
| 43 | JavaFX Script | 0.176% |
| 44 | MAX/MSP | 0.161% |
| 45 | LabVIEW | 0.157% |
| 46 | Falcon | 0.156% |
| 47 | Groovy | 0.152% |
| 48 | Modula-3 | 0.146% |
| 49 | Forth | 0.144% |
| 50 | Smalltalk | 0.135% |
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).
- 4th Dimension/4D, ABC, AD, Algol, APL, Applescript, Beta, Boo, Bourne shell, C shell, Caml/F#, cg, CL (OS/400), Clean, Clojure, Cobra, cT, Curl, Euphoria, Factor, Fan, Icon, IDL, Inform, Informix-4GL, Io, J, Lingo, MAD, Mathematica, ML, Modula-2, MOO, MUMPS, Natural, Occam, Oz, PowerBuilder, Progress, Q, R, REALbasic, Revolution, SIGNAL, SPSS, SuperCollider, VBScript, Verilog, VHDL, XSLT
November Newsflash – Brought to you by Paul Jansen
- This month the following changes have been made to the definition of the index:
- Jean-Michel Biraghi suggested to add the programming language « 4D » (formerly known as « 4th Dimension ») to the index. It enters the chart at position 91.
- Michael Richter noted that SQL as of SQL-99 is Turing Complete and thus should be counted as a programming language. This is true. But the necessary extension to deserve this predicate, Persisent Stored Modules (SQL/PSM), has never really taken off. So I think it is unfair to call SQL a programming language without renaming it to SQL/PSM. And if we do so, it would not be in the chart because it has for instance only 5 hits for the Google query « SQL/PSM programming ».
- There are still lots of mail that need to be processed. As soon as I have got some time I will answer them. Please be patient.
- 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
Nov 2009Position
Nov 2005Position
Nov 1999Position
Nov 1984Java 1 1 3 - C 2 2 1 1 PHP 3 4 25 - C++ 4 3 2 10 (Visual) Basic 5 5 5 4 C# 6 7 23 - Python 7 8 20 - Perl 8 6 4 - JavaScript 9 9 17 - Ruby 10 24 - - - 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 won another 2% to procedural languages in one month’s time. The popularity of dynamically typed languages seems to stabilize (see trend diagram below).
Category Ratings Nov 2009 Delta Nov 2008 Object-Oriented Languages 54.4% -3.2% Procedural Languages 41.6% +2.8% Functional Languages 2.8% +0.2% Logical Languages 1.3% +0.1% Category Ratings Nov 2009 Delta Nov 2008 Statically Typed Languages 59.2% -0.2% Dynamically Typed Languages 40.8% +0.2% 
