TIOBE Programming Community Index for June 2013

June Headline: JavaScript back in the top 10

This month, JavaScript re-entered the top 10 of the TIOBE index. It is still a bit of a miracle why this ubiquitous language is not yet part of the top 5. JavaScript is the glue of client-side web page programming nowadays. But JavaScript is currently expanding its application domain. Node.js has made JavaScript a server-side programming language and the amount of Javascript based games (mostly browser based) is increasing.

But there are also some threats for JavaScript. The JavaScript language is generally regarded as a programming language in which it is easy to make mistakes. It is interpreted, so most errors show up only at run-time. That's why Google designed Dart (currently at position 80) as JavaScript's successor. But also other programming languages were designed to generate JavaScript code instead of writing it manually. Examples of this are CoffeeScript (position 139) and TypeScript (position 207).

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, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about thebest 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 foundhere.

Position
Jun 2013Position
Jun 2012Delta in PositionProgramming LanguageRatings
Jun 2013Delta
Jun 2012Status11C17.809%+0.08%  A22Java16.656%+0.39%  A34Objective-C10.356%+1.26%  A43C++8.819%-0.54%  A57PHP5.987%+0.70%  A65C#5.783%-1.24%  A76(Visual) Basic4.348%-1.70%  A88Python4.183%+0.33%  A99Perl2.273%+0.05%  A1011JavaScript1.654%+0.18%  A1110Ruby1.479%-0.20%  A1212Visual Basic .NET1.067%-0.15%  A1317Transact-SQL0.913%+0.21%  A1414Lisp0.879%-0.11%  A1516Pascal0.779%-0.07%  A1621Bash0.711%+0.09%  A1719PL/SQL0.657%+0.02%  A--1813Delphi/Object Pascal0.602%-0.55%  A--1918Ada0.575%-0.11%  B2022MATLAB0.563%0.00%  B

Long term trends

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

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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 [e-mail].

PositionProgramming LanguageRatings21SAS0.543%22Lua0.537%23Assembly0.500%24R0.480%25D0.474%26COBOL0.441%27ABAP0.436%28Fortran0.407%29Scheme0.381%30Haskell0.322%31Erlang0.317%32Prolog0.313%33Scratch0.308%34Scala0.290%35Logo0.270%36Groovy0.269%37NXT-G0.235%38Smalltalk0.231%39APL0.222%40Forth0.212%41ML0.204%42ActionScript0.198%43F#0.166%44JScript.NET0.153%45Awk0.153%46Tcl0.144%47ATLAS0.143%48RPG (OS/400)0.140%49PL/I0.137%50Algol0.135%

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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, Alice, Apex, Applescript, AutoLISP, bc, C shell, CFML, CL (OS/400), Clojure, Common Lisp, Dart, Dylan, ECMAScript, Eiffel, Emacs Lisp, Go, Gosu, Heron, Icon, IDL, Informix-4GL, J, JavaFX Script, LabVIEW, Ladder Logic, Lasso, LPC, Mathematica, MS-DOS batch, MUMPS, NATURAL, Oberon, OCaml, Occam, OpenCL, Oz, PowerShell, Q, REXX, S, sed, Simulink, Smarty, SPARK, VBScript, VHDL, xBase, XSLT

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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 LanguagePosition
June 2013Position
June 2008Position
June 1998Position
June 1988C1211Java213-Objective-C342--C++4324PHP54--C#68--(Visual) Basic7557Python8730-Perl967-JavaScript10917-Lisp1416192Ada1917103

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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.

YearWinner2012Objective-C2011Objective-C2010Python2009Go2008C2007Python2006Ruby2005Java2004PHP2003C++

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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.

CategoryRatings June 2013Delta June 2012Object-Oriented Languages58.5%+1.0%Procedural Languages36.6%-0.4%Functional Languages3.2%-0.8%Logical Languages1.8%+0.1%

CategoryRatings June 2013Delta June 2012Statically Typed Languages70.3%-1.0%Dynamically Typed Languages29.7%+1.0%

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This Month's Changes in the Index

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

• Yahoo! doesn't publish the number of page hits any more. We don't know whether this is a temporary change or a permanent one. So this month the numbers for Yahoo! are missing.
• 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.

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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 [e-mail].

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 to query pages that have been added last year. The TIOBE index should only track those recently added pages.

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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 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 with 25 languages back in 2001, and now measures more than 150 languages once a month. The data are availabe in comma separated format. Please [e-mail] 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.

原文地址链接：http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html