TIOBE Programming Community index, an indicator of the popularity of programming languages which updates every month, announced with its new June Headline: The Long Tail of Programming Languages that “for the first time in the history of the TIOBE index a language needs to have a rating of more than 1.0% to be part of the top 20.”

As the number of programming languages is getting larger, there is now a wider programming languages market programmers can choose from. It doesn’t matter as much anymore that a language must be very popular, easy to use, and so on. As long as programmers are fine using another language that is not very popular but is adoptable, the programing languages market will keep expanding while the market percentages taken by well-known programming languages will keep going down.

“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.

TIOBE June Index showed that Java continues to be on the top followed by C, C++, and Python in the fourth place which recorded its Highest Position since 2001. Compared to other programming languages, Java has managed to increase its popularity the most during the year we left behind and managed to win TIOBE's Programming Language of 2015.

With a 5, 94% increase, Java was followed by Visual Basic.NET which had a 1.51% increase during the last year, and Python, the popularity of which rose up by 1.24%. During the second half of 2015, Java was doing really great on the TIOBE index, hitting the 20% bar in November 2015, a percentage that was last reached by Java in July 2009.

According to a TIOBE statement in November, Java’s popularity was continuing to rise during the last months of 2015 due to a successful JavaOne conference at the end of October. “Apart from Objective-C, PHP (-1.08%) and Oracle's PL/SQL (-1.00%) also lost ground in 2015. Other interesting changes are: Groovy (from #82 to #17), Erlang (from #89 to #35), Haskell (from #96 to #39) and Rust (from #126 to #47), whereas Go, Hack and Clojure are about to enter the top 50,” TIOBE showed.

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.

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