February Headline: C# and Python are closing the gap on PHP

The rise of C# and Python are continuing in 2011. Both languages scored another old-time high this month and are now busy with overtaking PHP. Other interesting news is that we started to add results of Chinese search engine Baidu and reintroduced Yahoo!. These search engines now only count for 3% each until all false positives have been weeded out. This change has already some effect: JavaScript is back in the top 10 while SAS and Transact-SQL both lost much ground.

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, 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 Feb 2011	Position Feb 2010	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings Feb 2011	Delta Feb 2010	Status
1	1		Java	18.482%	+1.13%	A
2	2		C	14.986%	-1.62%	A
3	4		C++	8.187%	-1.26%	A
4	7		Python	7.038%	+2.72%	A
5	3		PHP	6.973%	-3.03%	A
6	6		C#	6.809%	+1.79%	A
7	5		(Visual) Basic	4.924%	-2.13%	A
8	12		Objective-C	2.571%	+0.79%	A
9	10		JavaScript	2.558%	-0.08%	A
10	8		Perl	1.907%	-1.69%	A
11	11		Ruby	1.615%	-0.82%	A
12	-		Assembly*	1.269%	-	A-
13	9		Delphi	1.060%	-1.60%	A
14	19		Lisp	0.956%	+0.39%	A
15	37		NXT-G	0.849%	+0.58%	A–
16	30		Ada	0.805%	+0.44%	A–
17	17		Pascal	0.735%	+0.13%	A
18	21		Lua	0.714%	+0.21%	A–
19	13		Go	0.707%	-1.07%	A–
20	32		RPG (OS/400)	0.626%	+0.27%	A–

More details can be found on TIOBE Index here