Java Wins Programming Beauty Pageant, But C and Objective C Gussy Up

The Java programming language, bolstered by the adoption of Android-based smartphones and tablets in the market, has regained the crown as the top language in the Tiobe Programming Community Index put together by programming tool maker Tiobe Software.

The index is based on a number of different factors, including the availability of courses and training, the popularity of searches in Google, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, YouTube, and Baidu search engines, and the number of engineers with specific programming skills based on their employment and job searches. The Tiobe Index has been around for more than a decade, and it is as much for fun as it is for information.
Java was the number one language in the Tiobe Index for February, with a rating of 18.4 percent, up 1.34 points over the past year. C was second with a 17.1 percent rating and climbing 56/100ths of a point, followed by Objective C, with a 9.8 percent rating but climbing 2.74 points. (Objective C is the variant of C that is used on Apple iOS.) Objective C has jumped two spots, passing by C++, the new-and-improved, object-oriented version of C that stopped short of becoming Java, and C#, which is Microsoft's Java-C mashup for its Common Language Runtime that was supposed to be enough like a JVM to make everyone happy except Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) and IBM. Python, Ruby, VisualBasic.NET, Pascal, Bash, Matlab, and Assembly are all climbing among the top 20 programming languages in the February ranking.
Venerable COBOL has a rating of 0.514 percent among the top 50 languages and ranked just behind the SAS statistical programming language and just ahead of Fortran (used in supercomputers) and the R open source statistical language. Good ole Report Program Generator for IBM i and OS/400 ranked number 38 on the February 2013 list, with a rating of 0.247 percent. It jumps around a lot, sometimes kissing 1 percent. This time around, it is behind Smalltalk and ahead of OpenCL.

My guess is that there are around 15 million or so programmers in the world--meaning people who get paychecks for their work--so if you apply the Tiobe numbers to this figure, you won't get anything that makes sense. It is commonly believed that there are around 10 million Java programmers in the world, and if you multiplied the Tiobe index against the raw population, you would bet something on the order of 2.7 million Java programmers. Like I said, this is more for fun than fact.

As for RPG, if there are 150,000 customers worldwide as IBM has told us, and the average shop has between two and three programmers (with the so-called CIO being a programmer with system administration and budget responsibilities), then there should be maybe on the order of 300,000 to 450,000 RPG programmers in the world (okay, so maybe 5 percent to 10 percent of them are actually COBOL programmers on the IBM i platform. If you use the Tiobe numbers percent against the raw number of 0.247 percent for RPG, you get a number that is an order of magnitude lower than this. Again, this was meant to be fun.

Source: IT Jungle

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Java is less use than C, but index's precision is doubted

 The C language, which displaced Java as the most popular language in the Tiobe Programming Community monthly assessment in April, has maintained its number 1 spot in the May report released this week. But a high-profile member of the PHP community is questioning the accuracy of the index itself.

The May release of the index, which gauges the popularity of programming languages, had C used by 17.346% of developers, as opposed to 16.599% using Java. The index is based on the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses, and third-party vendors interested in the particular languages. Examinations of search engines including Google, Bing, and Yahoo are used to calculate ratings; other sites such as Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, and Baidu are factored in as well.

But Andi Gutmans, who is a key developer of PHP and CEO of PHP tools maker Zend Technologies, dismisses Tiobe's index, citing its tendency to fluctuate. "It's very questionable how they come up with those numbers," Gutmans said. Tiobe's index for May has PHP as the sixth-most-popular language, but used by just 5.711% of developers. Gutmans insists PHP usage is growing quickly. He cited other industry figures showing 50% of the Web running PHP.

Tiobe Managing Director Paul Jansen defended the index, saying most criticism comes from declining programming communities. "Of course, we use a very simple algorithm so it is easy to shoot at if [it] doesn't fit your expectations, but it shows something about the visibility of each language on the Internet over time," Jansen said. "It is not scientific but at least it is the best try I have seen so far. If Andi Gutmans has some suggestions [for] how to improve the Tiobe index, I really would like to know. We are willing to adjust the index if he shows up with a good suggestion."

Tiobe in its report said the top 10 languages in its index had not changed much in the past eight years, apart from Objective-C moving into a slot and Delphi moving out. New language adoption appears to be much harder than expected. "The main reason for this is probably that it is very difficult to migrate a large code base from one language to another one. So changes are slow. But even if we take this into account, there are no new languages that show a slow but constant [rise]," Jansen said in the report.

Tiobe cited Scala as an example of a language that has not had much movement over the years, even if it is becoming a hot topic in Internet discussions. Currently ranked 46th, Scala entered the Tiobe index at number 57 in 2006 and moved up to number 48 a year later.  "Not much happened to the language after that," Jansen said in the report. Other examples of languages not moving forward much in the index include F#,  ranked in the 40th spot now and 38th six years ago; Groovy, now 32nd and ranked 36th in 2008, and Erlang, which is now ranked 44th and was ranked 35th in 2006. "So where is that next big programming language? Let us know," said Jansen.

Also in Tiobe's top 10 for the month were: C++, in third place used by 9.825% of developers, followed by Objective-C with 8.309% and  C# at 6.823%. Ranking after PHP were Visual Basic with 5.457%; Python with 3.819%; Perl with 2.805%, and JavaScript with 2.135%.