40+ years old and still on top!

To paraphrase a rather famous politician, C is the worst of all programming languages, but it's the best we've got!

What surprises me about that list is that Objective C is more popular than C++ according to this survey. I know Objective C is common for Macs and iThingies, but it is rare outside that - and it is certainly not the only language used for programming such systems. I find it hard to believe that 9.4% of worldwide software development work is purely for Apple-only work.

The numbers in this survey come from how often people search for tutorials for languages. Maybe it is just that people find Objective C harder than C++, and need more tutorials. Or maybe good tutorials for Objective C are harder to find, and people have to search more for them!

I don't.

Someone has to write all that crap. (Well actually I fully expect someone has automated this by now, spamming the iphone store with 10s of thousands of look-alike junk!)

My customer keeps asking for an "iphone app", for an embedded device we make for them. No idea what they actually want it to do, and never mind that iphones are only 15% of the smartphone market, vs 80% for Android.

But I suppose I am going to have to get into this stuff :(

--

John Devereux

I know there are a lot of apps written for iPod/iPhone - often well out of proportion given the market share compared to Android. But how many of these are actually written in Objective C? I haven't written anything for an iThingy myself (I never even owned one), but a large number of apps are cross-platform between Android and iOS. Surely these are written in something else - Python, HTML5, C++, Java, etc.?

"The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu 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."

So, it's not about lines of code written, or $$ made on the code so produced, it's about what shows up most on search engines. That doesn't see to be a very useful measure, unless you're selling advertising space on programming-language websites.

--

Tim Wescott 
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I don't think it can be trivialized away that easily.

You can't deduce the per-unit profit of a Betamax vs. VHS VCR based on the number of *titles* available in each format. Nor can you deduce the technical merits of the two technologies. Or, the reliability of the transports and electronics.

But, you can see what MOVIE VENDORS perceive the markets for each of these technologies to be! The "relative interest".

It is a measure of one aspect of the "market" -- the number of LIVE web pages concerned with the particular language. Assuming (!) web page creators are reflecting their idea of what "the market" (defined as people wanting to find/create web pages) is interested in, this is a great way of "measuring".

You note "BASIC" isn;t on the list. And, it would be a lead pipe cinch to create a web page with scads of BASIC code.

BUT, NO ONE WOULD BE INTERESTED IN IT!

Note that the second metric cited on the page (PyPL) goes hunting for *tutorials*. These are web page creators casting their votes as to what languages they "see" as "up and coming". Presumably, mature languages (and simple languages) have fewer needed tutorials; "everyone ALREADY knows how to do this"!

You could argue that simple/mature languages might have MORE such pages (because any web-page-creator-wannabe could throw together even the simplest of inane tutorials!).

You could argue that simple/mature languages might have *less* (as above).

You could argue that complex languages would have more as there are more *issues* that need clarification.

You could argue that complex languages would have LESS as there are fewer folks knowledgeable in those issues willing to spend time creating web pages to address them. :>

The fact that C has remained at the top of this list for SO LONG has to mean "something".

E.g., I don't see APL, Limbo, etc.

What the index is *missing* is the consumer-side view of all this: how many searches were *issued* with these terms? How many pages were *visited*, etc.

Meaningless see later

They tend to do that through figures of sales around the world of the playing media (from machines to website visits) to figures of new sales trends (actual existing media and stats for downloads).

It is a limited form of market of search engines that does not count in the interlinked nature of the web. Where unless they have also downloaded spyware onto everyones computer the cases where different search methods are used they miss the following -

1/ those who may start with a school/university website its content and its direct links to known sites 2/ those who start from books that contain still active links and maybe direct links elsewhwere as well 3/ those who spend time in newsgroups/forums and get direct links from them 4/ those who get links from colleagues 5/ it only shows the start of a search on the search engine find a page that then takes them to a myriad of other resources NOT using the search engine 6/ those who have bookmarked sites they frequent for such information

A well ranked site generally has lots of links to and/or from other RELEVANT and RELATED sites.

For the figures to have any accuracy beyond what happens on search engines, this assumes all searches are done from the search engine and NOBODY follows any links on that site etc. . In other words they ALL ONLY look at the single page presented and repeat the search or go back to look at the next site.

Many of the existing ones may already be visited many times from other mthods. see later

Depends on definition on tutorial. ...

How many pages did they visit on each site for that search link Was that tutorial 10 pages and video for one topic Did that page contain 10 topics and did they find the others relevant Did they follow links out of that site

How many of those searches are REPEATS of the same term from same person or others

More importantly did they skip the search engine and go directly to the site. Typical examples would be for PHP, Python and those using w3schools.

Many other metrics missing

Some languages may be lower in the ranks for many reasons

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