January Headline: Google's Go is the TIOBE Programming Language of 2009!
Google's brand new programming language Go has won the "TIOBE's Programming Language of the Year 2009" award. This award is given to the programming language that gained most market share in 2009. Go had an increase of 1.25% since its official release announcement in November 2009. The difference with the runner-up is only 0.01%: Apple's language Objective-C scored a positive trend of 1.24% in one year's time.
Is Go a hype? May be. But even if it appears to be just another language, the fact that it is a language designed by Google is sufficient to make it really popular. Nobody will be blamed to use a language that is associated with the Google brand name. Apart from that, there is also something technically promising about Go. It has native support for concurrent programming, thus fulfilling the existing need of a language that allows efficient use of multicore processors.
It is astonishing to see that a programming language can rise so fast. Go was not listed yet last month and now it is already #13. This sudden change might be considered an inevitable consequence of our current culture, in which new information is spread and used around the globe at the speed of light.
Also close this year was PHP. It gained 1.19% in 2009 and surpassed Visual Basic and C++ to become number 3 of the chart. More information about trends and forecasts can be found in the news flash at the end of this page.
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 Jan 2010 | Position Jan 2009 | Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Jan 2010 | Delta Jan 2009 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  | Java | 17.482% | -1.54% | A |
| 2 | 2 | | C | 16.215% | +0.28% | A |
| 3 | 5 |  | PHP | 10.071% | +1.19% | A |
| 4 | 3 |  | C++ | 9.709% | -0.41% | A |
| 5 | 4 | | (Visual) Basic | 7.354% | -1.81% | A |
| 6 | 6 | | C# | 5.767% | +0.16% | A |
| 7 | 7 | | Python | 4.453% | -0.28% | A |
| 8 | 8 | | Perl | 3.562% | -0.74% | A |
| 9 | 9 | | JavaScript | 2.707% | -0.65% | A |
| 10 | 11 | | Ruby | 2.474% | -0.67% | A |
| 11 | 10 | | Delphi | 2.392% | -0.91% | A |
| 12 | 37 | | Objective-C | 1.379% | +1.24% | A |
| 13 | - | | Go | 1.247% | +1.25% | A-- |
| 14 | 14 | | SAS | 0.809% | +0.01% | A |
| 15 | 13 | | PL/SQL | 0.718% | -0.29% | A |
| 16 | 18 | | ABAP | 0.641% | +0.10% | A-- |
| 17 | 15 | | Pascal | 0.624% | -0.04% | B |
| 18 | 23 | | Lisp/Scheme | 0.576% | +0.14% | B |
| 19 | 20 | | ActionScript | 0.566% | +0.11% | B |
| 20 | 24 | | MATLAB | 0.540% | +0.11% | B |
