TIOBE - programming language rating

The Dutch company TIOBE Software BV is primarily known as the author of a regularly calculated rating of the popularity of programming languages . Most TIOBE employees are compiler development experts who started their careers in the Philips research lab. By the way, TIOBE stands for “The Importance Of Being Earnest” (How important it is to be serious - the name of the famous comedy by Oscar Wilde).

TIOBE rating has been calculated since June 2001. Initially it included 25 programming languages. Currently, the rating takes into account 150 programming languages. Measurements are carried out at least 10 times a month.
Specialists from TIOBE consider the language as a programming language if it is Turing complete. This means that for any function that can be calculated on a Turing machine, in this language, you can write a program that performs the same function.
As a result, such languages ​​as HTML, XML and SQL are not considered as programming languages. On the other hand, SQL extensions such as PL / SQL and Transact-SQL are programming languages. Development tools and technologies such as ASP, ASP.NET, Rails, and AJAX are also not considered programming languages. Finally, languages ​​such as assembler are excluded from consideration, although they are Turing-complete.
Dialects of the same programming language are united under a common name. In this case, the rating does not include the total weight of dialects, but the rating of the dialect that showed the best result.
The method of calculation is quite simple. With the help of the site Alexa.com three main search engines are defined. This is currently Google, MSN and Yahoo. In each of them, for each programming language participating in the rating, the following queries are launched:
+ "Language_name programming"
The same search is conducted on Google by newsgroups and blogs over the past 12 months.
The results obtained for the three search engines (the number of pages in the issue) are normalized using a certain formula, which determines the place of the language in the ranking.
If we count the first 50 programming languages ​​as 100%, then the TIOBE rating in numerical terms shows the share occupied by each language.
In addition, the authors of the ranking divide languages ​​into two categories: A and B (although there are A- and A--). They recommend when choosing a language for development or study (taking into account career prospects) to focus on languages ​​of category A, since for languages ​​of category B:

a) much less qualified specialists;

b) significantly less choice of high-quality development tools;
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c) fewer libraries available.
A reservation is made to consider the scope and nature of the project. So, the missile control system is likely to be written in Ada, which belongs to category B, and never in JavaScript, despite its belonging to category A.
TIOBE rating for April 2007 compared to April 2006:

Position Apr 2007	Position Apr 2006	Delta in position	Programming Language	Ratings Apr 2007	Delta Apr 2006	Status
one	one		Java	18.360%	-2.92%	A
2	2		C	14.937%	-2.75%	A
3	3		C ++	10.718%	-0.18%	A
four	four		Php	8.639%	-2.24%	A
five	five		(Visual) Basic	8.280%	-1.83%	A
6	6		Perl	6.039%	+ 0.19%	A
7	eight		Python	3.814%	+ 1.05%	A
eight	7		C #	3.551%	-0.40%	A
9	9		Javascript	3.137%	+ 1.57%	A
ten	17		Ruby	2.798%	+ 2.31%	A
eleven	ten		Delphi	2.334%	+ 0.89%	A
12	eleven		SAS	2.201%	+ 0.77%	A
13	12		PL / SQL	1.892%	+ 0.88%	A
14	nineteen		D	1.515%	+ 1.03%	A
15	25		ABAP	1.172%	+ 0.84%	A
sixteen	18		Ada	0.678%	+ 0.19%	B
17	14		Lisp / Scheme	0.676%	-0.05%	A--
18	sixteen		COBOL	0.651%	+ 0.13%	B
nineteen	26		Transact-SQL	0.622%	+ 0.30%	B
20	20		Fortran	0.613%	+ 0.15%	B

Schedule of changes in the popularity of the top ten languages ​​in the ranking, since July 2001:

Programming languages ​​ranked from 21 to 50: