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 [email protected].
| 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% |
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 [email protected] 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.
它的统计方法是基于全球有经验的工程师，科目和第三方厂商。 同时也参考来自 google,msn,yahoo等搜索引擎计算得出的结果。当然，这个排名并不说明哪个语言绝对最好，但是它可以给你一个参考，当你构建一个新的软件系统时，应该采用什么样的语言。 虽然它并不能代表什么，但它起码反映了软件工程领域的一些变化，vb从NO6跃居NO3位置，而c++则从NO3跌至NO5，java则取代c占据头号宝座，可见这的确也就是针对软件公司的一个参考（vb和java号称项目公司的两件法宝，看现在招工要的首要条件，c#的等级也在缓缓爬升），对开发领域则基本没有多大的参考价值。而Visual FoxPro则像一匹黑马从35直杀到13，感觉好像是国内等级考试导致google查询暴涨而产生的误差，因为新秀ruby也不过升到17位而已，像ocaml（mtasc就是它写的，一个开源的flash compiler）这样获得3届topcoder称号的快速开发语言则只排在47位，haskell（pug虚拟机就是它写的）也同样活得3届topcoder称号，它却连前50都没有进去。这两门语言都是函数式编程的看门法宝，如今微软也格外欣赏函数式编程的便捷而参照ocaml开发出F#语言。
软件工程导致软件开发领域发展的方向，这一点也不错，其实软件根本不是什么艺术品，它是取代人工解决实际问题的。工程不需要这种落后的方案它就要淘汰，但是它的思想却已经融汇到语言新秀中。看看面向对象的鼻祖simula在列表中存在么？
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