The TIOBE Programming Community index, an indicator of the popularity of programming languages which updates every month, showed that Java has once again hit the 20% bar this November. The last time Java’s popularity hit the 20% bar was in July 2009. According to a TIOBE statement, Java’s popularity has continued to rise during the last past months, “because of the successful JavaOne conference at the end of October.” At the moment, Java and C continue to be the 2 most popular programming languages in the TIOBE Index. “The gap between these 2 and the rest of the pack is now more than 10%.”
Over the last year, Java and C programming languages switched places. C’s ratings have gone down by 0.32%, placing it in the second place; while Java’s ratings have gone up by 6.01%, making Java the most popular programming language so far. Among the top 10 programing languages were: C++, C#, Python, PHP, JavaScript, Visual Basic.NET, Ruby, Perl. The index continued with these other programing languages that managed to be included in the TIOBE’s top 20: Assembly language, Delphi/Object Pascal, Visual Basic, Objective-C, Swift, MATLAB, Pascal, PL/SQL, R, and COBOL. Besides C, Perl, Visual Basic, Objective-C, PL/SQL, and R, all the other programing languages’ ratings included in TIOBE top 20, went up in November 2015.
TIOBE ratings, which are based on the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses and third party vendors, uses popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu to calculate the ratings. “It is important to note 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,” TIOBE clarifies.
TIOBE also publishes a hall of fame listing all Programming Language of the Year award winners. Since 2003 to 2014 these are the programing languages that have won the Programming Language of the Year award based on highest rise in ratings in one year: JavaScript (2014), TransactSQL (2013), Objective-C (2011), Python (2010) Go (2009), C ( 2008) Python (2007),Ruby (2006),Java (2005), PHP (2004), and C++ (2003). The 2015 winner is yet to be announced.