TIOBE Programming Community Index for March 2008
March Headline: Ruby after 4 months back in the top 10 again
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!, 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 Mar 2008 | Position Mar 2007 | Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Mar 2008 | Delta Mar 2007 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  |
Java | 20.651% | +2.61% | A |
| 2 | 2 | |
C | 15.593% | -0.04% | A |
| 3 | 5 |
 |
(Visual) Basic | 10.795% | +2.65% | A |
| 4 | 4 | |
PHP | 10.138% | +0.68% | A |
| 5 | 3 |
 |
C++ | 9.776% | -1.33% | A |
| 6 | 6 | |
Perl | 5.781% | -0.64% | A |
| 7 | 7 | |
Python | 4.593% | +0.70% | A |
| 8 | 9 |
|
C# | 4.143% | +0.78% | A |
| 9 | 12 |
|
Delphi | 2.697% | +0.94% | A |
| 10 | 10 | |
Ruby | 2.661% | -0.11% | A |
| 11 | 8 |
|
JavaScript | 2.462% | -1.02% | A |
| 12 | 14 |
|
D | 1.107% | -0.16% | A |
| 13 | 13 | |
PL/SQL | 0.747% | -0.80% | A |
| 14 | 11 |
|
SAS | 0.630% | -1.22% | A- |
| 15 | 18 |
|
COBOL | 0.615% | -0.03% | A- |
| 16 | 21 |
|
Pascal | 0.554% | -0.01% | B |
| 17 | 17 | |
Ada | 0.485% | -0.17% | B |
| 18 | 16 |
|
Lisp/Scheme | 0.434% | -0.29% | B |
| 19 | 19 | |
FoxPro/xBase | 0.423% | -0.18% | B |
| 20 | 25 |
|
Lua | 0.385% | -0.01% | B |
Long term trends
The long term trends for the top 10 programming languages can be found in the line diagram below.
