How popular is a programming language? Is somehow possible to quantify the level of adoption for a specific technology in relation to a particular geographical area? Giving an exact answer to these questions, especially to the second one, I think is almost impossible, because the concept of popularity can be very different, even subjective. We could talk about diffusion in terms of products, developers, companies, or even in terms of lines of code .. A clear and detailed answer to such questions would certainly provide significant guidance in relation to market trends, would help to better assess the adoption of a technology, to find a job in a given geographical area or to understand the need of a professional development in a given field.

Obviously there exist various sectoral studies, most made by technology consultancy companies, whose results are often not easily accessible, at least not without payment. So I’ve run a quick search on the Internet and come across some interesting websites which I’m going to write about below. Unfortunately what I’ve found does not offer any indication about the geographical distribution of the analyzed languages (or technologies), that’s a pity. However, I’m happy to see Java on the top of these rankings.

TIOBE PROGRAMMING COMMUNITY INDEX

[...] The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication 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, MSN, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and YouTube 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 Nov 2009	Position Nov 2008	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings Nov 2009	Delta Nov 2008	Status
1	1		Java	18.373%	-1.93%	A
2	2		C	17.315%	+2.04%	A
3	5		PHP	10.176%	+1.24%	A
4	3		C++	10.002%	-0.36%	A
5	4		(Visual) Basic	8.171%	-1.10%	A
6	7		C#	5.346%	+1.32%	A
7	6		Python	4.672%	-0.47%	A
8	9		Perl	3.490%	-0.39%	A
9	10		JavaScript	2.916%	-0.01%	A
10	11		Ruby	2.404%	-0.47%	A
11	8		Delphi	2.127%	-1.88%	A
12	13		PL/SQL	0.908%	-0.03%	A
13	38		Objective-C	0.893%	+0.74%	A-
14	14		SAS	0.816%	+0.09%	A
15	16		Pascal	0.654%	+0.14%	A–
16	15		ABAP	0.643%	+0.07%	A–
17	21		Lisp/Scheme	0.618%	+0.15%	B
18	22		MATLAB	0.611%	+0.15%	B
19	20		Lua	0.544%	+0.07%	B
20	12		D	0.543%	-0.90%	B

[ Visit the official website for more information and updated results .. ]

LANGPOP – PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE POPULARITY

We have attempted to collect a variety of data about the relative popularity of programming languages, mostly out of curiousity. To some degree popularity does matter – however it is clearly not the only thing to take into account when choosing a programming language. Most experienced programmers should be able to learn the basics of a new language in a week, and be productive with it in a few more weeks, although it will likely take much longer to truly master it. [...]

0.20

0.40

0.60

0.80

1.00

Forth

OCaml

Erlang

Ada

Smalltalk

Lua

Haskell

Cobol

D

Tcl

Fortran

ColdFusion

Scheme

Pascal

Lisp

Objective C

Delphi

Assembly

Actionscript

Visual Basic

Shell

Ruby

C#

SQL

Perl

Python

JavaScript

PHP

C++

C

Java

[ Visit the official website for more information and updated results .. ]