I’ve been noticing my interest in non-Microsoft languages has been on the rise lately. I’ve been actively playing with Ruby and PHP and have been blog surfing for information on functional languages like Lisp and Erlang.
I guess that’s why I suddenly became curious about the current popularity ratings of programming languages and started to search for some hard data. The most comprehensive rating system that I found so far is the Programming Community Index published by Tiobe Software.
Here’s an excerpt from their February 2008 results:
| Position Feb 2008 |
Position Feb 2007 |
Delta in Position |
Programming Language |
Ratings Feb 2008 |
Delta Feb 2007 |
Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  |
Java | 21.483% | +2.50% | A |
| 2 | 2 | |
C | 14.859% | -1.24% | A |
| 3 | 5 |  |
(Visual) Basic | 11.604% | +3.24% | A |
| 4 | 4 | |
PHP | 9.890% | +1.04% | A |
| 5 | 3 |  |
C++ | 9.274% | -1.49% | A |
| 6 | 6 | |
Perl | 6.205% | +0.13% | A |
| 7 | 7 | |
Python | 4.763% | +1.20% | A |
| 8 | 8 | |
C# | 4.510% | +1.32% | A |
| 9 | 12 | |
Delphi | 2.798% | +0.72% | A |
| 10 | 9 | |
JavaScript | 2.334% | -0.65% | A |
| 11 | 10 | |
Ruby | 1.862% | -0.67% | A |
The list led me to a few surprising conclusions:
- .NET isn’t as popular as I thought – It’s easy to lose perspective when you are surrounded by a single technology. For some reason I had assumed that C# and Java were equally popular. Although Java has declined about 5% on this survey over the last six years, it is still almost 5 times more popular than C#. In fact, C# is 8th on list behind C, C++, Perl, and even Visual Basic (oh the scandal!).
- Ruby didn’t make the top 10 – Although there has been somewhat of a backlash against Ruby in the blogosphere over the last few months, I still assumed it was popular enough to be in the top 10. I suppose I should have guessed as much after the last recruiter I talked to told me that she never heard of the language.
- COBOL refuses to die – I was saddened to see that COBOL is still 15th on the list. Some languages just don’t know when to quit. This shouldn’t surprise me since the bank I used to work at was at least 3-5 years from retiring their last COBOL program when I left and they were further ahead of the game than the vast majority of other financial institutions (they adopted .NET when it was still in Beta).
- Python was language of the year for 2008 – Apparently Tiobe awarded Python this status at the end of last year due to its surging popularity. I noticed this right after I got an impassioned endorsement of the language from someone whose opinion I respect. I guess it’s time to check it out.
- Functional languages are still on the fringe – DotNetRocks has had about a dozen shows on various functional programming in the last several months, so I thought that was a sure sign that the paradigm had gone main stream after a mere 50 years of relative obscurity. However, Functional Languages as a whole come in at a paltry 1.4% compared to the whopping 98% dominance of Object-Oriented and Procedural languages combined. LISP tops out the list at number 20, while Haskell is 36th, Erlang is 46th, and Scala barely made the top 100. Given the fact that we have hit the wall on processor speed and are well on our way to scaling out to a gajillion cores, I’m surprised that functional languages haven’t achieved a Ruby like cult status yet. Do you really want to spend your golden years debugging multi-threaded programs in Java or .NET? I didn’t think so. On a brighter note, Functional language searches rate quite high on reddit as indicated by this other poll. Perhaps there is still hope.
Category Ratings February 2008 Delta February 2007 Object-Oriented Languages 54.8% +3.1% Procedural Languages 42.9% -1.9% Functional Languages 1.4% -0.4% Logical Languages 0.9% -0.8% - Dynamic languages are coming on strong - Rails has definitely proven the value that dynamic languages can bring to the table in terms of meta-programming magic and generally making life easier for the programmer, but I was surprised to see that dynamic languages were already almost as popular as static languages in overall usage. I obviously forgot about the prevalence of PHP, Python, and Perl.
Category Ratings February 2008 Delta February 2007 Statically Typed Languages 57.2% -0.2% Dynamically Typed Languages 42.8% +0.2%
As an interesting side note, there were some languages that didn’t show up on the list because of the “Turing Complete” requirements that the site used.
A language is considered a programming language if it is Turing complete. As a consequence, HTML and XML are not considered programming languages. This also holds for data query language SQL. 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. ASP and ASP.NET are also not programming languages because they make use of other languages such as JavaScript and VBScript or .NET compatible languages. The same is true for frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Cocoa, and AJAX. Finally, we have also excluded assembly languages, although Turing complete, because they have a very different nature.
No matter how you look at it, there are a lot of options out there that are being taken seriously these days and the number seems to only be growing.
It reminds me of a quote that I recently heard from Steven Forte. He stated in an interview that he won’t hire candidates if they have too much experience in any one language. He suggested only spending about 2 years on a language before moving on to something else. I was skeptical of his career advice at first, but now I’m starting to think that he had a point.
We are clearly entering the era of the polyglot programmer, which means that diversification is becoming more and more of a career asset.
Popularity: 55% [?]
