Monday, 21 January 2008

Java on the Decline? Think Again

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It seems that everywhere I look people are taking pot shots at Java, declaring it passe and acting like it's on it's death bed. What a nice thing it is to see unbiased measurement of language popularity from Tiobe. That link is to the January 2008 Programming Community Index.

Here's what their unbiased measurements actually show:

Java is the most popular language, capturing 20.8% of the popularity
That lead increased over second place C (now at 13.9%) by 3.6% over a year ago
Java's absolute popularity increased from a year ago by 1.7%
Ruby's popularity is 2.3% ranking it 11th
Python was the biggest gainer over the last year, growing 2.0%, giving it 6th place
Python overtook long time rival Perl for the first time this year
Visual Basic (now 3rd) was the second biggest gainer, Java was 3rd
Ruby's popularity actually fell 0.17% over the last year
Perl, ranking 7th, is still more than twice as popular that Ruby
C lost the most ground at -1.89%
C++ lost the second most ground at -1.7%
C++ fell to 5th, as it was overtaken by both Visual Basic and PHP
PHP gained 1.25% in popularity over the year
Java is more popular than VB and C# combined (aka .net) which total 15.7%
Delphi at 3.3% surged ahead of both Javascript and Ruby.
Lua ranks 16th, up from 46th
Groovy ranks 31st