It's time again for an update to the TIOBE Programming Community Index. I blogged about this a while back, and it's time to notice it again. This index measures only how often a programming language is mentioned by name - in people's resumes, in job ads, in tutorials, even in explanations of other languages or comparisons between languages. It is an interesting measure of which languages people consider relevant in conversation or in describing themselves.

C++ has moved up from 4th overall to 3rd (still behind Java and C, pulling ahead of Perl) but if you look back over the last five years, it's clear less people are bringing C++ into their conversations than they once did:

What I find most confusing is the tiny numbers for C#. Oh sure, I know this is just a graph of the top ten, and things like Ruby aren't even here, but to be neck and neck with Delphi over all this time? That's kind of strange. There are obviously large swaths of the internet where I don't normally go, where people talk about Delphi a lot.

I wonder what's the uptick of Java talk over the last year? Could it be all the "Java is over" articles? By the way the steep drop for C++ and Java in April 2004 is an artifact as a result of a Google cleanup-clearout, and since then the index includes more search engines.

Kate