TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2011

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December Headline: C++ about to be dethroned by C#

Since the beginning of the TIOBE index back in 2001, the programming language C++ has been number 3 of the chart in a

very consistent way. Perl, Visual Basic and PHP have been number 3 too, but these languages could keep this position only

for a few months. Now C# is knocking on the door. It will certainly be a tough battle again. C# is Microsoft's most active and

evolving programming language, whereas Microsoft recently announced to revive C++ in favor of... C#. We will see what

will happen the next few months.

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

Dec 2011

Position

Dec 2010 Delta in Position Programming Language

Ratings

Dec 2011

Delta

Dec 2010 Status

1 1

Java 17.561% -0.44% A

2 2

C 17.057% +0.98% A

3 3

C++ 8.252% -0.76% A

4 5

C# 8.205% +1.52% A

5 8

Objective-C 6.805% +3.56% A

6 4

PHP 6.001% -1.51% A

7 7

(Visual) Basic 4.757% -0.36% A

8 6

Python 3.492% -2.99% A

9 9

Perl 2.472% +0.14% A

10 12

JavaScript 2.199% +0.69% A

11 11

Ruby 1.494% -0.29% A

12 10

Delphi/Object Pascal 1.245% -0.93% A

13 13

Lisp 1.175% +0.11% A

14 23

PL/SQL 0.803% +0.24% A

15 14

Transact-SQL 0.746% -0.03% A

TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2011

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16 16

Pascal 0.734% -0.03% A

17 18

Ada 0.632% -0.02% B

18 35

Logo 0.619% +0.26% B

19 17

Assembly 0.563% -0.10% B

20 25

ABAP 0.560% +0.01% B

Long term trends

The long term trends for the top 10 programming languages can be found in the line diagram below.

TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2011

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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 Lua 0.550%

22 MATLAB 0.536%

23 RPG (OS/400) 0.532%

24 R 0.522%

25 NXT-G 0.512%

26 C shell 0.493%

27 VHDL 0.480%

28 Fortran 0.477%

29 Erlang 0.469%

30 Scheme 0.456%

31 SAS 0.417%

32 Scratch 0.414%

33 Prolog 0.403%

34 Go 0.394%

35 Visual Basic .NET 0.364%

36 F# 0.358%

37 COBOL 0.339%

38 D 0.330%

39 Forth 0.322%

40 Haskell 0.310%

41 Tcl 0.297%

TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2011

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42 APL 0.287%

43 ML 0.284%

44 Ladder Logic 0.281%

45 Groovy 0.273%

46 Smalltalk 0.272%

47 LabVIEW 0.262%

48 Awk 0.258%

49 PL/I 0.246%

50 Q 0.245%

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, ABC, ActionScript, Algol, Alice, Bash, bc, BETA, BlitzMax, Boo, Bourne shell, CFML, cg, CL

(OS/400), Clean, Clojure, cT, Dart, Dylan, Eiffel, Euphoria, Factor, Icon, IDL, Io, J, JavaFX Script, JScript.NET,

Korn shell, Lingo, MAD, MUMPS, NATURAL, Oberon, Occam, OpenCL, OpenEdge ABL, Oz, PowerShell,

REXX, S, Scala, SPSS, Standard ML, SuperCollider, VBScript, Verilog, X10, xBase, Z shell

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 Language Position

Dec 2011

Position

Dec 2006

Position

Dec 1996

Position

Dec 1986

Java 1 1 5 -

C 2 2 1 1

C++ 3 3 2 7

C# 4 8 - -

TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2011

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Objective-C 5 42 - -

PHP 6 5 - -

(Visual) Basic 7 4 3 5

Python 8 7 26 -

Perl 9 6 6 -

JavaScript 10 10 25 -

Lisp 13 17 16 2

Ada 17 16 12 3

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.

Year Winner

2010 Python

2009 Go

2008 C

2007 Python

2006 Ruby

2005 Java

2004 PHP

2003 C++

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 now.

Category Ratings Dec 2011 Delta Dec 2010

Object-Oriented Languages 56.6% -0.5%

Procedural Languages 37.0% -0.9%

Functional Languages 4.4% +0.9%

Logical Languages 2.0% +0.5%

TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2011

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Category Ratings Dec 2011 Delta Dec 2010

Statically Typed Languages 71.1% +2.0%

Dynamically Typed Languages 28.9% -2.0%

This Month's Changes in the Index

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

Markus Humm observed that Free Pascal doesn't match our criteria for being considered a programming language.

So Free Pascal has been removed from the index.

The confidence of programming languages Cg, Logo and R have been set to 90% to compensate for false search

engine hits.

TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2011

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Rowan Davies did some helpful research: Visual Basic, ABAP and PL/SQL all appear to be statically typed instead

of dynamically typed (as we indicated). This has been adjusted. Note that also the trend diagram for type systems

has been altered due to this change. It is much flatter now than it was before.

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.

Bugs & Change Requests

This is the top 5 of most requested changes and bugs. If you have any suggestions how to improve the index don't hesitate to

send an e-mail to tpci@tiobe.com.

1. Apart from "<language> programming", also other queries such as "programming with <language>", "<language>

development" and "<language> coding" should be tried out.

2. Add queries for other natural languages (apart from English). The idea is to start with the Chinese search engine

Baidu. This has been implemented partially and will be completed the next few months.

3. Add a list of all search term requests that have been rejected. This is to minimize the number of recurring mails

about Rails, JQuery, JSP, etc.

4. Start a TIOBE index for databases, software configuration management systems and application frameworks.

5. Some search engines allow querying pages that have been added last year. The TIOBE index should only track those

recently added pages.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: Why is the maximum taken to calculate the ranking for a grouping, why not the sum?

A: Well, you can do it either way and both are wrong. If you take the sum, then you get the intersection twice. If you

take the max, then you miss the difference. Which one to choose? Suppose somebody comes up with a new search

term that is 10% of the original. If you take the max, nothing changes. If you take the sum then the ratings will rise

10%. So taking the sum will be an incentive for some to come up with all kinds of obscure terms for a language.

That's why we decided to take the max.

The proper way to solve this is of course to take the sum and subtract the intersection. This will give rise to an

explosion of extra queries that must be performed. Suppose a language has a grouping of 15 terms, then you have to

perform 32,768 queries (all combinations of intersections). So this seems not possible either... If somebody has a

solution for this, please let us know.

Q: Am I allowed to show the TIOBE index in my weblog/presentation/publication?

A: Yes, the only condition is to refer to its original source "www.tiobe.com".

Q: I would like to have the complete data set of the TIOBE index. Is this possible?

A: We spent a lot of effort to obtain all the data and keep the TIOBE index up to date. In order to compensate a bit

for this, we ask a fee of 5,000 US$ for the complete data set. The data set runs from June 2001 till today. It started

TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2011

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with 25 languages back in 2001, and now measures more than 150 languages once a month. The data are available

in comma separated format. Please contact sales@tiobe.com for more information.

Q: What happened to Java in April 2004? Did you change your methodology?

A: No, we did not change our methodology at that time. Google changed its methodology. They performed a general

sweep action to get rid of all kinds of web sites that had been pushed up. As a consequence, there was a huge drop

for languages such as Java and C++. In order to minimize such fluctuations in the future, we added two more search

engines (MSN and Yahoo) a few months after this incident.

Q: Why is YouTube used as a search engine for the TIOBE index?

A: First of all, YouTube counts only for 10% of all ratings, so it has hardly any influence on the index. YouTube has

been added as an experiment. It qualified for the TIOBE index because of its high ranking on Alexa. YouTube is a

young platform (so an indicator for popularity) and there are quite some lectures, presentations, programming tips

and language introductions available on YouTube.

Bibliography BIBLIOGRAPHY

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