The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator 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. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used 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. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.
Source: TIOBE Software: Tiobe Index
This index is one of those things that is easy to find and easier to forget about in the noise of the Internet but it is the best way to get a quick read on the languages being used in the real world. Too often we are over influenced by “flavor of the month” projects and languages that distort how work is really getting done in the broader world. I’m not surprised that Java and C are the top languages since those are the languages of choice for most business applications. Python, PHP, and JavaScript are the core academic and web languages. The thing that makes me smile is that Ruby ranks below Perl. And COBOL is still in the top 20.