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.

 

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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%

 

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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

 

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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 2009	Position Mar 2004	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings Mar 2009	Delta Mar 2004
  1	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%