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!, Wikipedia 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.
| 1 | 1 |  |
Java | 20.147% | -0.74% | A |
| 2 | 2 | |
C | 16.779% | +1.27% | A |
| 3 | 3 | |
C++ | 10.594% | -0.21% | A |
| 4 | 4 | |
PHP | 9.675% | -0.53% | A |
| 5 | 5 | |
(Visual) Basic | 7.943% | -1.84% | A |
| 6 | 7 |  |
Python | 4.756% | -0.14% | A |
| 7 | 8 | |
C# | 4.536% | +0.48% | A |
| 8 | 9 | |
JavaScript | 4.021% | +1.09% | A |
| 9 | 6 |
|
Perl | 3.909% | -1.64% | A |
| 10 | 10 | |
Ruby | 2.629% | -0.01% | A |
| 11 | 11 | |
Delphi | 2.182% | +0.16% | A |
| 12 | 14 |
|
PL/SQL | 0.879% | +0.12% | A |
| 13 | 26 |
|
RPG (OS/400) | 0.778% | +0.53% | A-- |
| 14 | 13 | |
SAS | 0.759% | -0.16% | A |
| 15 | 15 | |
Pascal | 0.759% | +0.16% | A |
| 16 | 27 |
|
ABAP | 0.726% | +0.49% | A-- |
| 17 | 12 |
|
D | 0.620% | -0.83% | A-- |
| 18 | 16 |
|
Lisp/Scheme | 0.607% | +0.17% | B |
| 19 | 19 | |
Lua | 0.557% | +0.19% | B |
| 20 | 23 |
|
MATLAB | 0.527% | +0.26% | B |
The long term trends for the top 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 tpci@tiobe.com.
| 21 | ActionScript | 0.444% |
| 22 | Logo | 0.403% |
| 23 | COBOL | 0.397% |
| 24 | Fortran | 0.374% |
| 25 | Ada | 0.370% |
| 26 | FoxPro/xBase | 0.369% |
| 27 | PowerShell | 0.299% |
| 28 | Scratch | 0.252% |
| 29 | Prolog | 0.216% |
| 30 | Scala | 0.208% |
| 31 | Haskell | 0.205% |
| 32 | LabVIEW | 0.193% |
| 33 | Erlang | 0.176% |
| 34 | ML | 0.173% |
| 35 | Transact-SQL | 0.172% |
| 36 | Groovy | 0.152% |
| 37 | Caml/F# | 0.149% |
| 38 | Smalltalk | 0.148% |
| 39 | Forth | 0.148% |
| 40 | Awk | 0.140% |
| 41 | Focus | 0.138% |
| 42 | Tcl/Tk | 0.132% |
| 43 | NXT-G | 0.131% |
| 44 | Alice | 0.129% |
| 45 | Objective-C | 0.123% |
| 46 | J | 0.117% |
| 47 | APL | 0.115% |
| 48 | CL (OS/400) | 0.110% |
| 49 | VHDL | 0.105% |
| 50 | Bourne shell | 0.101% |
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, Beta, Boo, C shell, cg, Clean, Clojure, Cobra, cT, Curl, Dylan, Eiffel, Euphoria, Factor, Falcon, Fan, Icon, IDL, Inform, Intercal, Io, JavaFX Script, Lingo, MAD, Magic, Maple, Mathematica, MAX/MSP, MUMPS, Natural, Occam, Oz, PL/I, Postscript, Progress, Q, R, Revolution, REXX, S-lang, SIGNAL, SPSS, SuperCollider, VBScript, Verilog, XSLT
- This month the following changes have been made to the index:
- The programming language Fan has been added to the list of languages to be monitored. It is currently at position 78.
- Edward Hsieh notified us about the JavaFX Script language. This language enters the top 100 at position 72. So JavaFx Script will be monitored as well from now on.
- Thanks to Walter Bright we have removed the 10% false positive factor for the programming language D. He pointed out that the number of false positives for D has decreased considerably the last couple of months.
- The RPG grouping has been extended with ILE and RPGLE, and the CL grouping with CLLE. These were suggestions from Branden Legg.
- The search engine Wikipedia has been added to the group of search engines that are used to determine the rankings. It has a very small weighing in determining the overall scores in the beginning. Wikipedia counts now for 10%, YouTube for 20%, whereas all the others count for 100%.
- To see the bigger picture, please find the 5 years delta in the table below.
1 2 Java 20.147% +2.61% 2 1 C 16.779% -1.51% 3 3 C++ 10.594% -1.95% 4 6 PHP 9.675% +0.96% 5 4 (Visual) Basic 7.943% -2.46% 6 7 Python 4.756% -1.82% 7 10 C# 4.536% +2.89% 8 11 JavaScript 4.021% +2.57% 9 5 Perl 3.909% -6.47% 10 24 Ruby 2.629% +2.47%
- The previous winners of the "Language of the Year" award are shown below.
2008 C 2007 Python 2006 Ruby 2005 Java 2004 PHP 2003 C++