In the aftermath of the latest spat between Rubyists and Javaholics, it might be worth noting that Ruby is now the 10th most popular programming language, up from 13th place a year ago. That, anyway, is the story according to the TIOBE Programming Community index which gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages and is updated once a month based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.

The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings, according to TIOBE - which on its site carries the warning:

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 ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines. The search query that is used is

+"<language> programming"

The search query is executed for the regular Google, MSN, and Yahoo! web search and the Google newsgroups and blogs for the last 12 months. The web site Alexa.com has been used to determine the most popular search engines.

By applying the search engine query as defined above, a lot of hit counts are collected. Let's define "hits(PL#i,SE)" as the number of hits of programming language PL at position i of the TIOBE index for search engine SE. The counted hits are normalized for each search engine for the first 50 languages. More formally, the rating for PL#i becomes

((hits(PL#i,SE1)/hits(PL#1) + ... + hits(PL#50)) + ... + (hits(PL#i,SEn)/hits(PL#1) + ... + hits(PL#50)))/n

where n is the number of search engines used.

The Top 10 as at October 2007 is as follows:

1.   Java
2.   C
3.   (Visual) Basic
4.   C++
5.   PHP
6.   Perl
7.   C#
8.   Python
9.   JavaScript
10. Ruby

Line Diagram Copyright © 2007 TIOBE Software BV