TIOBE Programming Community Index for July 2012
July Headline: Objective-C overtakes C++
This month there is an interesting change in the TIOBE index: Objective-C has become more popular than C++. Both Objective-C and C++ started in 1983 as object-oriented successors of the C languages. Right from the beginning, Objective-C and C++ competed to
become the de facto object-oriented programming language. It took quite some years before C++ could claim victory. Now Objective-C is back (thanks to the iPhone and iPad), but not as a direct competitor of C++ any more. C++ is used heavily in large high-performance
systems whereas Objective-C is mainly used in the mobile apps industry.
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 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 2012 |
Position Jul 2011 |
Delta in Position | Programming Language |
Ratings Jul 2012 |
Delta Jul 2011 |
Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 |
 |
C | 18.331% | +1.05% | A |
| 2 | 1 |
 |
Java | 16.087% | -3.16% | A |
| 3 | 6 |
|
Objective-C | 9.335% | +4.15% | A |
| 4 | 3 |
|
C++ | 9.118% | +0.10% | A |
| 5 | 4 |
|
C# | 6.668% | +0.45% | A |
| 6 | 7 |
|
(Visual) Basic | 5.695% | +0.59% | A |
| 7 | 5 |
|
PHP | 5.012% | -1.17% | A |
| 8 | 8 |
 |
Python | 4.000% | +0.42% | A |
| 9 | 9 |
|
Perl | 2.053% | -0.28% | A |
| 10 | 12 |
|
Ruby | 1.768% | +0.44% | A |
| 11 | 10 |
|
JavaScript | 1.454% | -0.79% | A |
| 12 | 14 |
|
Delphi/Object Pascal | 1.157% | +0.27% | A |
| 13 | 13 |
|
Lisp | 0.997% | +0.09% | A |
| 14 | 15 |
|
Transact-SQL | 0.954% | +0.15% | A |
| 15 | 25 |
|
Visual Basic .NET | 0.917% | +0.43% | A |
| 16 | 16 |
|
Pascal | 0.837% | +0.17% | A |
| 17 | 19 |
|
Ada | 0.689% | +0.14% | B |
| 18 | 11 |
|
Lua | 0.684% | -0.89% | B |
| 19 | 21 |
|
PL/SQL | 0.645% | +0.10% | A-- |
| 20 | 26 |
|
MATLAB | 0.639% | +0.19% | B |
Long term trends
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.
| Position | Programming Language | Ratings |
|---|---|---|
| 21 | Logo | 0.616% |
| 22 | C shell | 0.585% |
| 23 | Bash | 0.584% |
| 24 | SAS | 0.549% |
| 25 | Assembly | 0.548% |
| 26 | Fortran | 0.451% |
| 27 | ABAP | 0.444% |
| 28 | R | 0.441% |
| 29 | RPG (OS/400) | 0.440% |
| 30 | COBOL | 0.438% |
| 31 | Scheme | 0.421% |
| 32 | NXT-G | 0.344% |
| 33 | Eiffel | 0.343% |
| 34 | Prolog | 0.336% |
| 35 | D | 0.336% |
| 36 | Scratch | 0.331% |
| 37 | Haskell | 0.306% |
| 38 | PL/I | 0.305% |
| 39 | Q | 0.256% |
| 40 | JScript.NET | 0.255% |
| 41 | Erlang | 0.252% |
| 42 | Awk | 0.251% |
| 43 | Smalltalk | 0.245% |
| 44 | APL | 0.240% |
| 45 | Scala | 0.237% |
| 46 | Forth | 0.230% |
| 47 | ML | 0.224% |
| 48 | Ladder Logic | 0.215% |
| 49 | Alice | 0.200% |
| 50 | (Visual) FoxPro | 0.187% |
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, ActionScript, Algol, bc, Boo, CFML, CHILL, CL (OS/400), Clean, Clojure, Curl, Dylan, F#, Factor, Gambas, Go, Groovy, Icon, Inform, Informix-4GL, Io, J, JavaFX Script, LabVIEW, Lingo, Max/MSP, Modula-2,
MUMPS, NATURAL, Oberon, OCaml, Occam, OpenCL, OpenEdge ABL, Oz, PowerShell, Processing, REXX, S, S-PLUS, SPARK, SPSS, Standard ML, Tcl, VBScript, Verilog, VHDL, X10, xBase, XSLT
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 Language |
Position July 2012 |
Position July 2007 |
Position July 1997 |
Position July 1987 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Java | 2 | 1 | 5 | - |
| Objective-C | 3 | 46 | - | - |
|
|