The hottest programming languages

Do you know what the hottest programming languages are nowadays? How are the languages in long term trends? What kinds of languages would be dark horses in the near future?

TIOBE Programming Community (TPC) Index gives the answers and keeps updating monthly. The TPC Index is to rank the popularity of programming languages that we are currently using.

The Index is a really good reference for us to review what kind of programming language we should use or we should learn. It's a visual barometer of programming market and a visual thermometer of programming languages.

The ratings in the index are calculated based on the relevant availabilities reported from search engines Google, MSN and Yahoo!. The site also gives the definition for how the TPC index is assembled due to many enquiries about it. It is reasonable and has been recognised by other organisations. For example, the well-known IT publisher O'Reilly has proven that "there was a correlation between their book sales and the TPC index." Apple and NASA also referred to the TPC index in their strategic documents.

See the update for June 2006:

• Java is the hottest.
• C/C++ is still most widely used.
• VB ranks #4 while VB.NET is knocking on the door of top-20 list.
• C# is the only pure .NET language in top-20 list.
• Script languages, such as PHP, Perl and JavaScript, are active in top-10 list.

and surprisingly

• Visual FoxPro ranks #12, even higher than PL/SQL, as the most fast-growing language!

Visual FoxPro (VFP) ranked 24th one year ago and has incredibly doubled its rank now. In the column for Delta in Position in the Index table, VFP's field even can not be put in with the 12 green up-arrows indicating the growing interest in the language, and has to use "12*" instead. :-)

However, in a few words, the TPC index from TIOBE Software ought to be focused on by all active developers and IT managers, especially those who are hiring developers or who are looking for a job, including me. ;-)