Cdsrc will summarize the popularity in programming languages in the early 2008. This list is based on TIOBEs programming community index.
To summarize it first: Java is leading. If you take both C and C++, they would have the lead, so our conclusion is that C/C++ is slightly more popular then Java. This list is basicly based on how much resources there are available for each language which means that languages such as PHP get lots of attention. Even though PHP is a very popular language, it has it’s drawbacks when it comes to perfomance issues which means that it can never be used in a high-performing software.
The language “Lua”, which most people never heard of became known when they included it in WoW (World of warcraft). You can script some simple scripts to increase your abilities (your own, not your characters) in WoW.
Visual Basic has also made an increase through the last months, possibly because of Windows Vista. Another interesting jump was made by Python. Python has passed both Perl and C# and the curve is showing even further increases.
The language with the most interesting future could be Ruby, which has backed down a little bit, but has a lot of interesting techniques that got to get rewards at some time.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 | Java 20.849% C 13.916% (Visual) Basic 10.963% PHP 9.195% C++ 8.730% Python 5.538% Perl 5.247% C# 4.856% Delphi 3.335% JavaScript 3.203% Ruby 2.345% PL/SQL 1.230% SAS 1.204% D 1.172% COBOL 0.932% Lua 0.579% FoxPro/xBase 0.506% Pascal 0.456% Lisp/Scheme 0.413% Logo 0.386% |
This was the list of the top 1-20, now to be followed by the 21-50:
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 | ColdFusion 0.353% ActionScript 0.342% Ada 0.337% Fortran 0.305% RPG 0.251% MATLAB 0.241% Awk 0.213% Prolog 0.212% ABAP 0.195% LabView 0.169% Groovy 0.168% Transact-SQL 0.155% Smalltalk 0.133% Bash 0.133% Tcl/Tk 0.130% Haskell 0.119% Forth 0.116% CL (OS/400) 0.114% Natural 0.105% ML 0.092% Focus 0.091% Ch 0.088% PL/I 0.088% Lingo 0.087% Factor 0.084% REXX 0.075% Objective-C 0.071% 0.059% Erlang 0.057% VBScript 0.056% |
The TIOBE company has an own list of programming language popularity where you can check programming language popularity.
This list is not even near 100% accurate but gives you a very good hint of which language to use and more likely which language to NOT use when developing an advanced software. The index itself is built upon a not so sophisticated method, which is basically to search the major search engines with this term:
+”<language> programming”
and count the number of hits received.
That’s why the list is not that accurate but it still gives you a rough estimate of which languages that are growing and which are not.
The top 20 popular programming languages in September 2007 is (the % is of total market share):
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 | Java 21.701% C 14.908% Visual Basic 10.748% PHP 10.204% C++ 9.938% Perl 5.416% C# 3.583% Python 3.025% Javascript 2.722% Ruby 2.065% PL/SQL 1.860% SAS 1.395% D 1.370% Delphi 1.224% ABAP 0.706% Lisp/Scheme 0.633% COBOL 0.630% Lua 0.572% Ada 0.566% Fortran 0.478% |
To notice from the source both c++ and c is falling in line, although it’s not much. You can also note that PHP is actually more popular then C++. This could be because of PHP’s simplicity compared to C++ which generate more “newbie-questions” about PHP rather then C++.
The top climber, Lua, is not a very known programming language. Lua is most known for homebrewed software for Playstation Portable and Nintendo DS. On a later matter, the language has been used to create scripts in World of Warcraft, which most likely is the reason for the huge climbing (thanks Sickwookie comment #1). The language itself is claimed to be a mix of Python, Icon, Scheme and Lips.
The list from 21-50 can is here (the % is of total market share):
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 | Transact-SQL 0.452% Pascal 0.429% ActionScript 0.407% FoxPro/xBase 0.387% Awk 0.383% MATLAB 0.364% IDL 0.326% Prolog 0.313% ColdFusion 0.297% Logo 0.249% Bash 0.221% RPG 0.198% Tcl/Tk 0.187% LabView 0.178% Haskell 0.147% Smalltalk 0.145% CL (OS/400) 0.133% Forth 0.119% Natural 0.116% Erlang 0.109% VBScript 0.102% APL 0.101% REXX 0.088% Objective-C 0.084% OCaml 0.082% Icon 0.079% Postscript 0.076% Lingo 0.075% ML 0.074% R 0.072% |