TIOBE Programming Community Index for July 2006

July Headline: Both C++ and Perl score all time lows

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, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TPC 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 TPC index can be found here.

Position July 2006	Position July 2005	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings July 2006	Delta July 2005	Status
1	2		Java	21.853%	+2.19%	A
2	1		C	17.829%	-2.02%	A
3	6		(Visual) Basic	10.689%	+4.62%	A
4	4		PHP	10.350%	+1.18%	A
5	3		C++	9.779%	-1.28%	A
6	5		Perl	5.626%	-2.20%	A
7	7		C#	3.401%	+0.26%	A
8	8		Python	3.017%	+0.49%	A
9	9		JavaScript	2.108%	+0.33%	A
10	10		Delphi	2.037%	+0.30%	A
11	12		SAS	1.746%	+0.54%	A
12	13		PL/SQL	0.956%	-0.09%	A
13	35	22 *	Visual FoxPro	0.868%	+0.60%	A
14	18		Ada	0.548%	-0.20%	B
15	15		Lisp/Scheme	0.515%	-0.46%	B
16	21		Pascal	0.511%	-0.04%	B
17	30	13 *	Ruby	0.506%	+0.20%	B
18	33	15 *	ActionScript	0.484%	+0.20%	B
19	16		VB.NET	0.477%	-0.48%	B
20	11	9 *	COBOL	0.464%	-0.93%	B

Long term trends

The long term trends for the first 10 programming languages are depicted in the line diagram below.

Other programming languages

On request, 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.

The Next 50 Programming Languages

The following list of languages denotes #51 till #100. Since the differences are relatively small between these languages, they are only listed (in alphabetical order).

• ABC, Algol, Alpha, APL, AppleScript, Beta, Boo, cg, Ch, Clarion, Clean, Clipper, cT, Curl, dc, Dylan, Eiffel, Erlang, Euphoria, Felix, Focus, Haskell, Inform, Io, J#, Limbo, Lua, MAD, Magic, Mathematica, Modula-2, Moto, MUMPS, Natural, Oberon, Occam, OPL, Oz, Pike, PILOT, PL/1, Powerbuilder, Progress, Q, REALBasic, Scala, SIGNAL, VHDL, XSLT, and Yorick.

July‘s Newsflash - Brought to you by Paul Jansen

• From this month on we also measure the hits of Google Blogs. The languages that benefit from this are Java, Visual Basic, Ruby, and VB.NET. On the other hand, Ada, D, dBase, and Fortran have a lower rating now because they are not popular in blogs.

• There was a funny mail from Marcelo Barros de Almeida. He suggested to search for the query "<language> sucks" (sorry for this term) to get a feeling about languages that are unpopular. The top 5 is 1. Java, 2. PHP, 3. C++, 4. C, and 5. Ruby.

• In the tables below some long term trends are listed about categories of languages. The tables show that the object-oriented paradigm is gaining popularity very slowly, and compiled, statically typed languages are getting back in the spotlight.
  
  

  Category	Ratings July 2006	Delta July 2005
  Procedural Languages	50%	-2%
  Object-Oriented Languages	48%	+4%
  Logical Languages	1%	-1%
  Functional Languages	1%	+0%

  
  
  

  Category	Ratings July 2006	Delta July 2005
  Typed Languages	65%	+3%
  Untyped Languages	35%	-3%

Frequently Asked Questions

• Q: What definition of programming languages has been used?
  
  A: We adopted the definition of programming language from Wikipedia. Based on this definition languages such as HTML and XML are not considered programming languages. The same holds for data query language SQL. ASP and ASP.NET are also not because it is regarded a technique that makes use of other languages such as JavaScript and VBScript or .NET compatible languages.
  
  
• Q: How are dialects of languages grouped?

  A: Some languages are grouped together because they are very similar to each other. An example is the language entry Basic which covers Visual Basic, QBasic, Microsoft Basic, etc. VB.NET is an exception to this rule because it differs too much from classic Visual Basic versions. The ratings for a collection of languages is calculated by taking the maximum of all individual entries. BTW, assembly languages are not grouped in the index because they differ so much from each other in our opinion that they should be treated separately.

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

  A: This is OK provided that the original source is referred to: www.tiobe.com.

• 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.

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