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 attpci@tiobe.com.

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%

Frequently Asked Questions

• Q: What definition of programming languages has been used?

  A: A language is considered a programming language if it is Turing complete. As a consequence, HTML and XML are not considered programming languages. This also holds for data query language SQL. SQL is not a programming language because it is, for instance, impossible to write an infinite loop in it. On the other hand, SQL extensions PL/SQL and Transact-SQL are programming languages. ASP and ASP.NET are also not programming languages because they make use of other languages such as JavaScript and VBScript or .NET compatible languages. The same is true for frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Cocoa, and AJAX. Finally, we have also excluded assembly languages, although Turing complete, because they have a very different nature.

• 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 has been added as well to the Visual Basic entry because it is often referred to as Visual Basic. The ratings for a collection of languages is calculated by taking the maximum of all individual entries (not its sum!).

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

  A: This is OK provided that you 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 1,500 US$ for the complete data set. This might seem a lot of money but it is considered strategic data. The data set runs from June 2001 till today. It started with 25 languages back in 2001, and now measures more than 150 languages at least 10 times per month. The data are availabe in comma separated format. Part of the deal is that new data will be send to you for 1 extra year. 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.

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