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rss TIOBE Programming Community Index for November 2008 November Headline: Visual Programming Languages Popular (Logo, Alice, NXT-G) The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. 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.
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.
Position Programming Language Ratings 21 Lisp/Scheme 0470% 22 MATLAB 0466% 23 Ada 0410% 24 Fortran 0380% 25 FoxPro/xBase 0320% 26 Prolog 0314% 27 RPG (OS/400) 0298% 28 Awk 0256% 29 LabVIEW 0235% 30 Tcl/Tk 0230% 31 Erlang 0220% 32 Bourne shell 0220% 33 Caml 0196% 34 Alice 0188% 35 PL/I 0188% 36 Haskell 0163% 37 NXT-G 0153% 38 Objective-C 0149% 39 Smalltalk 0148% 40 PowerShell 0143% 41 Groovy 0138% 42 ML 0132% 43 Scala 0120% 44 REXX 0119% 45 Transact-SQL 0115% 46 Forth 0114% 47 Euphoria 0114% 48 CL (OS/400) 0111% 49 Natural 0105% 50 VHDL 0105% 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). First of all Perl is at an all-time low, whereas Delphi is still on the rise. Delphi is competing for TIOBE's "Language of the Year 2008 Award" together with C++ and Python. Another interesting trend concerns visual programming languages. Most of them have an educational nature for new programmers. Logo, certainly the oldest visual programming language, enters the top 20 this month. The new StarLogo TNG implementation from MIT is probably one of the major causes of this success. Alice, developed by Carnegie Mellon, is new at position 34, whereas Lego Mindstorms' programming language NXT-G is at position 37. The popularity of dynamically typed languages seems to be stabilizing (see trend diagram below).
Frequently Asked Questions * Q: What definition of programming languages has been used? A: A language is considered a programming language if it is Turing complete. As a consequence, HTML and XML are not considered programming languages. SQL is not a programming language because it is, for instance, impossible to write an infinite loop in it. On the other hand, SQL extensions PL/SQL and Transact-SQL are programming languages. The same is true for frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, Cocoa, and technologies such as AJAX. Finally, we have also excluded assembly languages, although Turing complete, because they have a very different nature. A: Some languages are grouped together because they are very similar to each other. An example is the language entry Basic which covers Visual Basic, QBasic, Microsoft Basic, etc. NET has been added as well to the Visual Basic entry because it is often referred to as Visual Basic. 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 1,500 US$ for the complete data set. This might seem a lot of money but it is considered strategic data. It started with 25 languages back in 2001, and now measures more than 150 languages at least 10 times per month. Part of the deal is that new data will be send to you for 1 extra year.
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. A: First of all, YouTube counts only for 7% of all ratings, so it has hardly any influence on the index. 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.
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