Dr. Dobb's | C's #1! C's #1!

C's #1! C's #1!

The reports of C's demise have been greatly exaggerated, at least according to the most recent TIOBE Programming Community Index. Yes, good old C is back on top in the # 1 position in the TIOBE index.

According to the good folks at TIOBE, the scores for C have been consistent over the years, varying between the 15% and 20% market share for almost 10 years. So the main reason for C's number 1 position is not C's uprise, but says TIOBE, the decline of its competitor Java. Java has a long-term downward trend. It is losing ground to other languages running on the JVM. An example of such a language is JavaFX script that is now approaching the top 20.

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 definition of the TIOBE index is explained in this Dr. Dobb's interview with TIOBE's Paul Janson. The current top 20 programming languages according to TIOBE are:

C
Java
C++
PHP
(Visual) Basic
C#
Python
Perl
Delph
JavaScript
Objective-C
Ruby
SAS
PL/SQL
Go
Pascal
ABAP
MATLAB
ActionScript
Lua

So what's your current favorite programming language? And what do you attribute rankings to? Let's face it... Objective-C wouldn't have been that high on the list if it weren't for the iPhone and iPad -- or would it? Share your take on all this by commenting below.

April 07, 2010
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/cs-1-cs-1/228700781