Java Wins Programming Language of 2006 Award

Java has won the “TIOBE Programming Language of 2005″ award. The Java language has increased its popularity in 2005 with 4.77%. This is the highest positive delta if compared to other programming languages. Congratulations to the Java team! Java version 5, released at the end of 2004, has definitely proven to be a step forward in strong typing with its generic types. We are looking forward to Java 6 in 2006! The runners up for 2005 are C# (+1.35%) and suprisingly Visual Basic (+1.17%).

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 world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings.

Note: The TPC index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The algorithmic nature of computation makes it free from editorial bias.

Position Jan 2006	Position Jan 2005	Delta	Programming Language	Ratings Jan 2006	Delta Jan 2005	Status
1	2		Java	22.254%	+4.77%	A
2	1		C	19.008%	-1.70%	A
3	3		C++	11.464%	-0.46%	A
4	4		PHP	9.402%	-0.07%	A
5	5		(Visual) Basic	9.089%	+1.16%	A
6	6		Perl	7.045%	-0.41%	A
7	9		C#	3.554%	+1.35%	A
8	7		Python	2.604%	-0.23%	A
9	8		Delphi/Kylix	1.582%	-0.98%	A
10	10		JavaScript	1.538%	-0.16%	A
11	12		SAS	1.162%	-0.24%	A
12	11		PL/SQL	1.032%	-0.62%	A
13	13		COBOL	0.763%	-0.30%	A
14	17		Lisp/Scheme	0.604%	+0.00%	A–
15	16		Pascal	0.525%	-0.11%	B
16	25		ColdFusion	0.520%	+0.25%	B
17	18		VB.NET	0.511%	-0.04%	A–
18	19		Fortran	0.466%	-0.05%	B
19	20		Ada	0.465%	-0.02%	B
20	48	28*!	Visual FoxPro	0.448%	+0.37%	B

Note: Ruby is currently at 22nd position.

Source: TIOBE via Calvin Austin