Java has won the TIOBE Index programming language award of the year. This is because Java has the largest increase in popularity in one year time (+5.94%). Java leaves runner ups Visual Basic.NET (+1.51%) and Python (+1.24%) far behind. At first sight, it might seem surprising that an old language like Java wins this award. Especially if you take into consideration that Java won the same award exactly 10 years ago. On second thought, Java is currently number one in the enterprise back-end market and number one in the still growing mobile application development market (Android). Moreover, Java has become a language that integrates modern language features such as lambda expressions and streams. The future looks bright for Java.
Java's rise goes hand in hand with Objective-C's decline (-5.88%). Apple's announcement to replace Objective-C by Swift some time ago was the main cause of this fall. It was expected that Swift would gain as much popularity as Objective-C left behind, but that doesn't appear to be the case. This is also observed in practice: TIOBE's customers are not eagerly migrating to Swift yet. Apart from Objective-C, PHP (-1.08%) and Oracle's PL/SQL (-1.00%) also lost ground in 2015. Other interesting changes are: Groovy (from #82 to #17), Erlang (from #89 to #35), Haskell (from #96 to #39) and Rust (from #126 to #47), whereas Go, Hack and Clojure are about to enter the top 50.
So what is the outlook for 2016? I expect that Java, PHP (with the new 7 release), JavaScript and Swift will be the top 10 winners for 2016. Scala might gain a permanent top 20 position, whereas Rust, Clojure, Julia and TypeScript will also move up considerably in the chart.
The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator 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. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note 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.
| Jan 2016 | Jan 2015 | Change | Programming Language | Ratings | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 |  |
Java | 21.465% | +5.94% |
| 2 | 1 |  |
C | 16.036% | -0.67% |
| 3 | 4 | |
C++ | 6.914% | +0.21% |
| 4 | 5 | |
C# | 4.707% | -0.34% |
| 5 | 8 | |
Python | 3.854% | +1.24% |
| 6 | 6 | PHP | 2.706% | -1.08% | |
| 7 | 16 |  |
Visual Basic .NET | 2.582% | +1.51% |
| 8 | 7 | |
JavaScript | 2.565% | -0.71% |
| 9 | 14 | |
Assembly language | 2.095% | +0.92% |
| 10 | 15 | |
Ruby | 2.047% | +0.92% |
| 11 | 9 | |
Perl | 1.841% | -0.42% |
| 12 | 20 | |
Delphi/Object Pascal | 1.786% | +0.95% |
| 13 | 17 | |
Visual Basic | 1.684% | +0.61% |
| 14 | 25 | |
Swift | 1.363% | +0.62% |
| 15 | 11 |  |
MATLAB | 1.228% | -0.16% |
| 16 | 30 | |
Pascal | 1.194% | +0.52% |
| 17 | 82 | |
Groovy | 1.182% | +1.07% |
| 18 | 3 | |
Objective-C | 1.074% | -5.88% |
| 19 | 18 | |
R | 1.054% | +0.01% |
| 20 | 10 | |
PL/SQL | 1.016% | -1.00% |