The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication 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. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. 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 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.

Position Sep 2009	Position Sep 2008	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings Sep 2009	Delta Sep 2008	Status
1	1		Java	19.383%	-1.33%	A
2	2		C	16.861%	+1.48%	A
3	5		PHP	10.156%	+0.91%	A
4	3		C++	9.988%	-0.73%	A
5	4		(Visual) Basic	9.196%	-1.29%	A
6	7		Perl	4.528%	-0.31%	A
7	8		C#	4.186%	-0.15%	A
8	6		Python	3.930%	-1.08%	A
9	9		JavaScript	2.995%	-0.14%	A
10	11		Ruby	2.377%	-0.38%	A
11	10		Delphi	1.972%	-1.08%	A
12	18		Pascal	0.961%	+0.56%	A
13	16		Lisp/Scheme	0.842%	+0.42%	A–
14	13		PL/SQL	0.819%	+0.12%	A
15	14		SAS	0.781%	+0.14%	A
16	24		ABAP	0.705%	+0.42%	A
17	12		D	0.588%	-0.68%	B
18	42		Objective-C	0.585%	+0.48%	B
19	17		Lua	0.507%	+0.09%	B
20	25		MATLAB	0.506%	+0.25%	B

Long term trends

The long term trends for the top 10 programming languages can be found in the line diagram below.