TIOBE Programming Community Index for November 2004

November Headline: SAP/ABAP programmers still in great demand

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 world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TPC 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.

Position	Delta 1 Year	Programming Language	Ratings	Delta 1 Year	Status
1		C	17.992%	+0.99%	A
2		Java	14.804%	-8.28%	A
3		C++	13.865%	-2.45%	A
4		(Visual) Basic	10.529%	+3.12%	A
5		Perl	9.726%	+2.04%	A
6		PHP	7.586%	+4.02%	A
7		Delphi/Kylix	5.310%	+3.77%	A
8		Python	5.200%	+3.43%	A
9		SQL	3.003%	-0.69%	A
10		C#	1.504%	-0.40%	A
11		JavaScript	1.195%	-0.72%	A
12		SAS	1.076%	-0.26%	A
13		COBOL	0.794%	-0.46%	A-
14		IDL	0.627%	-0.05%	B
15		ABAP	0.504%	+0.08%	B
16		Lisp	0.469%	-0.35%	B
17		Pascal	0.467%	-0.35%	B
18		Fortran	0.431%	-0.35%	B
19		Ada	0.362%	-0.44%	B
20		Postscript	0.345%	-0.17%	B

Legend

The last 3 columns need a bit of extra explanation:

• Ratings. The search query '+"<language> programming" -tv' is used to calculate the TPC Index. This query is executed for the regular Google and Yahoo! web search and the Google newsgroups for the last 12 months. The formula that is applied is #(normalized Google web hits) + #(normalized Yahoo! web hits) + #(normalized Google newsgroup hits). The term "normalized" means that the sum of all web hits of the first 50 languages for a query is taken and evenly distributed. If the number of hits for one of the 3 applied queries deviates more than a factor 2 from the results of the previous month, its new value is discarded because the query result is considered to be a temporary anomaly.
  
  
• Delta 1 Year. This column indicates the changes in ratings for the last 12 months. Observe that the first "Delta 1 Year" column indicates the difference in position.
  
  
• Status. Programming languages that have status "A" are considered to be mainstream languages. Status "A-" and "A--" indicate that a programming language is inbetween status "A" and "B". From a supportability point of view, it is strongly advised to stick to mainstream languages for industrial, mission-critical software systems. If a programming language has a rating that is higher than 0.7% for at least 3 months it is rewarded status "A". The first two months the programming language will receive status "A--" and "A-" respectively. The opposite holds for languages that go from status "A" to status "B".

Long term trends

The long term trends for the first 10 programming languages are depicted in the line diagram below.

Other programming languages

On request, 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.

November's Newsflash

• Pascal has been introduced as a separate entry this month. Until now Pascal has been part of the Delphi/Kylix group of programming languages. Various e-mails concerning Pascal initiated this change. The general motivation was most of the times something like "if VB.NET and classic Visual Basic are considered separate languages, Pascal and Delphi should be regarded as different languages as well". Since there is no historical data available for Pascal, its one years' difference had to be estimated. For this we took the average of two other dinosaurs: COBOL and Fortran. Within one year we can use Pascal's own historical data.
  
  
• Because I was really surprised about the revival of Delphi, I asked Delphi expert Bob Swart (http://www.drbob42.com ) why. According to him this is mainly because Delphi allows you to program single-source for both win32 and .NET by using VCL, just like CLX enables single-source Delphi development for both Windows and Linux.
  
  
• Finally, FYI. We started monitoring the programming languages Rebol, Clarion and Simula (again) and stopped keeping track of the Cg and Curl programming languages.
  
  

Frequently Asked Questions

• Q: What definition of programming languages has been used?
  
  A: The adopted definition is "any computer language which is either interpreted or compiled and is capable of manipulating data". Based on this definition languages such as HTML and XML are not considered programming languages. ASP is also not because it is regarded a technique that makes use of other languages such as JavaScript and VBScript.
  
  
• Q: How are dialects of languages grouped?

  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. VB.NET is an exception to this rule because it differs too much from classic Visual Basic versions. The ratings for a collection of languages is calculated by taking the maximum of all individual entries. BTW, assembly languages are not grouped in the index because they differ so much from each other in our opinion that they are treated separately.

Send mail to webmaster@tiobe.com with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 2000-2004 TIOBE Software BV