TIOBE Programming Community Index

TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2007
December Headline: Python surpasses Perl for the first time in history
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 world-wide availability of skilled engineers, 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 Dec 2007	Position Dec 2006	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings Dec 2007	Delta Dec 2006	Status
1	1		Java	20.049%	+0.14%	A
2	2		C	13.173%	-3.44%	A
3	4		(Visual) Basic	10.219%	+1.31%	A
4	5		PHP	8.393%	-0.14%	A
5	3		C++	7.871%	-2.54%	A
6	7		Python	4.697%	+0.93%	A
7	6		Perl	4.383%	-2.01%	A
8	8		C#	3.994%	+0.82%	A
9	11		Ruby	3.089%	+0.76%	A
10	10		JavaScript	2.733%	+0.17%	A
11	9		Delphi	2.673%	+0.10%	A
12	14		D	1.633%	+0.66%	A
13	13		PL/SQL	1.394%	+0.05%	A
14	12		SAS	1.393%	-0.84%	A
15	18		COBOL	0.894%	+0.29%	A-
16	15		ABAP	0.875%	-0.03%	A-
17	17		Lisp/Scheme	0.841%	+0.20%	A-
18	20		Transact-SQL	0.817%	+0.35%	A--
19	19		Pascal	0.791%	+0.23%	A--
20	46		Lua	0.771%	+0.67%	A-

Long term trends
The long term trends for the first 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	Logo	0.745%
22	Fortran	0.699%
23	MATLAB	0.649%
24	Ada	0.643%
25	ActionScript	0.504%
26	ColdFusion	0.473%
27	Prolog	0.392%
28	FoxPro/xBase	0.354%
29	Awk	0.341%
30	RPG	0.323%
31	LabView	0.319%
32	Natural	0.265%
33	Smalltalk	0.263%
34	Haskell	0.260%
35	Bash	0.248%
36	Groovy	0.247%
37	Tcl/Tk	0.205%
38	Forth	0.186%
39	CL (OS/400)	0.170%
40	Erlang	0.169%
41	Focus	0.153%
42	ML	0.138%
43	Scala	0.118%
44	APL	0.117%
45	VBScript	0.112%
46	Csh	0.110%
47	Ch	0.107%
48	Factor	0.105%
49	ABC	0.105%
50	Icon	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).

AD, Alpha, Applescript, AspectJ, BCPL, Beta, Boo, cg, Clean, Curl, DC, Dylan, Eiffel, Euphoria, F#, Fortress, IDL, Intercal, Io, J#, Lingo, MAD, Magic, Maple, Mathematica, MOO, MUMPS, Oberon, Objective-C, OCaml, Occam, Oz, PILOT, PL/I, Postscript, Powerbuilder, PowerShell, Progress, Q, R, REALbasic, Rebol, REXX, S-lang, SIGNAL, SPSS, Verilog, VHDL, Whitespace, XSLT

December Newsflash - Brought to you by Paul Jansen

Next month we will announce the "programming language of 2007". There are a lot of candidates left for the title. The most promising languages are Visual Basic, Ruby, C#, and Python. Place your bets...

Douglas Wang found an error in the formula to calculate the TIOBE index. Fortunately, it only concerned the way it was presented and not the algorithm itself. Thanks Douglas!

It is interesting to see that the large programming languages are losing ground percentage wise. The 0.7% cut for the A status was between position 15 and 16 a year ago, at the moment this cut is between position 21 and 22.

In the tables below some long term trends are listed about categories of languages. The tables show that dynamically typed object-oriented languages are still becoming more popular.

Category	Ratings December 2007	Delta December 2006
Object-Oriented Languages	54.4%	+2.2%
Procedural Languages	41.9%	-3.6%
Functional Languages	2.0%	+1.1%
Logical Languages	1.8%	+0.3%

Category	Ratings December 2007	Delta December 2006
Statically Typed Languages	55.7%	-2.8%
Dynamically Typed Languages	44.3%	+2.8%

original source: www.tiobe.com.