Skip to content

Programming Language Index – version 2013

A couple of years ago I had a look at the state of the TIOBE index that ranks the most popular programming languages.

So has C# finally dethrone C++ as THE language of the year? Or has LOLCODE and Brainfuck made it into the list? Well not quite, but an interesting thing is the uptake of Objective-C taking the third place! Of course an explanation can be found in the explosion of iOS apps that are developed with that language.

The usual suspects, i.e. C and Java are still at the top, followed by Objective-C and C++. It is interesting to note that they all share a very similar structure.

Position Jan 2013 Position
Jan 2012
Delta in Position Programming Language
1 2 C
2 1 Java
3 5 Objective-C
4 4 C++
5 3 C#
6 6 PHP
7 7 (Visual) Basic
8 8 Python
9 9 Perl
10 10 JavaScript
11 12 Ruby
12 24 Visual Basic .NET
13 13 Lisp
14 14 Pascal
15 11 Delphi/Object Pascal
16 17 Ada
17 23 MATLAB
18 20 Lua
19 21 Assembly
20 72 Bash

Languages in the other top ten are pretty good candidates and should not be too much of a surprise to see PHP, VB and Python there. Nice to see that languages like Pascal and Ada are still there in the top 20. But Bash? Really? How can we explain the move from 72nd to 20th?

And after that? Well, Fortran appears in place 25th… (I know!), COBOL and SQL are there and for those that have taken the R programming language to their hearts, it makes an appearance at the 26th place. An interesting addition is the appearance of the educational language Alice at the 50th place.

Position Programming Language Ratings
21 PL/SQL 0.585%
22 Transact-SQL 0.578%
23 SAS 0.571%
24 COBOL 0.496%
25 Fortran 0.462%
26 R 0.444%
27 Scheme 0.433%
28 ABAP 0.430%
29 Logo 0.389%
30 Prolog 0.359%
31 Erlang 0.334%
32 Haskell 0.331%
33 Scala 0.319%
34 Q 0.318%
35 D 0.296%
36 RPG (OS/400) 0.291%
37 Smalltalk 0.254%
38 Forth 0.239%
39 APL 0.235%
40 NXT-G 0.233%
41 ML 0.227%
42 Common Lisp 0.206%
43 ActionScript 0.195%
44 Awk 0.192%
45 F# 0.187%
46 Scratch 0.187%
47 PL/I 0.167%
48 LabVIEW 0.165%
49 Tcl 0.159%
50 Alice 0.158%