TIOBE Programming Community index, an indicator of the popularity of programming languages which updates every month, announced with its new August Headline: “C at an all time low in the TIOBE index” that C’s programming language score of 11.303% this August 2016 is its lowest score since 2001 when TIOBE index was in use.
“One of the main reasons for this drop is that C is hardly suitable for the booming fields of web and mobile app development. Moreover the C programming language doesn't evolve like the other big languages such as Java, C++ and C#. There is a "new" C11 standard available but this contains only minor changes. The constraint that C object code should remain small and fast doesn't help here. Moreover, adding C++ like features is also out of the picture because that's what C++ is for already,” according to software quality company TIOBE index.
According to TIOBE, another reason why C programming language may have reached its lowest score in the last 15 years, may the fact that the language is not getting much support from giant companies such as Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc, compared to the support languages like JavaScript and Python have been getting in the past few years.
“So C is a bit stuck. Yet another reason why C is getting into trouble is that there is no big company promoting the language. Oracle supports Java, Microsoft supports C++, C# and TypeScript, Google supports Java, Python, Go, Dart and JavaScript, Apple promotes Swift and Objective-C, etc. but none of them supports C publicly,” TIOBE index added on their August 2016 entry.
Last month TIOBE Programming Community index announced that Assembly Language re-entered the TIOBE index Top 10. According to TIOBE it is a surprise that a language like Assembly Language, which is one of the languages that has had the lowest level a programming language can have, has re-entered TIOBE index top 10 again this July 2016.
Other programming languages besides Assembly language that have an increased popularity this month are Tcl which moved from the 65th position to the 48th, CFML (ColdFusion) which jumped from the 102nd position to the 66th, and Maple which this July moved 20 positions higher ranking the 74th.
“This indicates that the number of real market leaders is going down. The set of languages to chose from is getting bigger and more and more less well-known programming languages are being adopted. About 10 years ago, the first 8 language covered 80% of the market, now this is reduced to 55%. This phenomenon is also called the long tail, a term that has been popularized by Chris Anderson of Wired in 2004,” according to TIOBE.