Programming Language Rating in 2008

August 4, 2008 at 11:05 pm (PHP)
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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
Jul 2008		 Position
Jul 2007		 Delta in Position Programming Language Ratings
Jul 2008		 Delta
Jul 2007		 Status
1 1 Java 21.345% +0.33% A
2 2 C 15.945% -0.42% A
3 3 C++ 10.693% +0.19% A
4 4 (Visual) Basic 10.447% +0.72% A
5 5 PHP 9.525% +0.87% A
6 6 Perl 5.131% -0.20% A
7 8 Python 4.973% +1.95% A
8 7 C# 4.000% +0.29% A
9 9 JavaScript 2.757% +0.24% A
10 10 Ruby 2.735% +0.64% A
11 13 Delphi 2.011% +0.51% A
12 14 D 1.224% -0.14% A
13 11 PL/SQL 0.736% -1.23% A
14 12 SAS 0.629% -1.23% B
15 – PowerShell 0.436% +0.44% B
16 23 Pascal 0.432% -0.05% B
17 17 COBOL 0.413% -0.17% B
18 18 Lua 0.408% -0.17% B
19 16 Ada 0.407% -0.20% B
20 15 Lisp/Scheme 0.384% -0.30% B

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 0.367%
22 ActionScript 0.363%
23 FoxPro/xBase 0.357%
24 RPG (OS/400) 0.328%
25 Fortran 0.292%
26 ABAP 0.261%
27 MATLAB 0.253%
28 Prolog 0.221%
29 Awk 0.200%
30 Transact-SQL 0.164%
31 LabVIEW 0.159%
32 Bourne shell 0.158%
33 PL/I 0.152%
34 Euphoria 0.151%
35 Smalltalk 0.124%
36 Erlang 0.121%
37 DC 0.118%
38 Groovy 0.117%
39 Haskell 0.109%
40 ML 0.109%
41 Tcl/Tk 0.105%
42 CL (OS/400) 0.101%
43 Forth 0.092%
44 Lingo 0.089%
45 REXX 0.088%
46 Caml 0.087%
47 Objective-C 0.085%
48 Natural 0.082%
49 R 0.082%
50 APL 0.081%

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, Applescript, AspectJ, Beta, Boo, C shell, cg, Ch, Clean, cT, Curl, Dylan, Eiffel, Factor, Felix, Focus, Icon, IDL, Inform, Io, MAD, Magic, Maple, Mathematica, Modula-2, MOO, MUMPS, Oberon, Occam, Oz, Pike, PILOT, Postscript, PowerBuilder, Progress, Q, REALbasic, Rebol, S-lang, Scala, SIGNAL, SPSS, TOM, VBScript, Verilog, VHDL, XSLT

July Newsflash – Brought to you by Paul Jansen

  • Powershell seems to become the next new scripting language on the front after the breakthrough of Ruby (2006) and Lua (2007). Powershell is sometimes positioned as the successor of the good old DOS batch language, but it is in fact a real .NET scripting language with nice functional features.
  • In the tables below some long term trends are listed about categories of languages. The object-oriented paradigm is at an all time high with 56.6%.
    Category Ratings July 2008 Delta July 2007
    Object-Oriented Languages 56.6% +3.9%
    Procedural Languages 41.1% -2.3%
    Functional Languages 1.7% -0.3%
    Logical Languages 0.7% -1.2%
    Category Ratings July 2008 Delta July 2007
    Statically Typed Languages 59.1% -0.2%
    Dynamically Typed Languages 40.9% +0.2%

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