The TIOBE programming community index is a measure of popularity of programming languages, created and maintained by TIOBE Software BV, based in

Eindhoven Eindhoven () is a city and municipality in the Netherlands, located in the southern province of North Brabant of which it is its largest. With a population of 238,326 on 1 January 2022,Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

. TIOBE stands for ''

The Importance of Being Earnest ''The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People'' is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious ...

'', the title of an 1895 comedy play by

Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is ...

, to emphasize the organization's "sincere and professional attitude towards customers, suppliers and colleagues". The index is calculated from the number of

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

results for queries containing the name of the language. The index covers searches in

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

, Google Blogs,

MSN MSN (meaning Microsoft Network) is a web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps for Windows and mobile devices, provided by Microsoft and launched on August 24, 1995, alongside the release of Windows 95. The Microsoft Net ...

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

, Baidu,

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

and

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

. The index is updated once a month. The current information is free, but the long-term statistical data is for sale. The index authors have stated that it may be valuable when making various strategic decisions. TIOBE focuses on

Turing complete Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical com ...

languages, so it does not provide information about the popularity of, for instance,

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

History

TIOBE index is sensitive to the ranking policy of the search engines on which it is based. For instance, in April 2004 Google performed a cleanup action to get rid of unfair attempts to promote the search rank. As a consequence, there was a large drop for languages such as

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

and C++, yet these languages have stayed at the top of the table. To avoid such fluctuations, TIOBE now uses multiple search engines. In August 2016, C reached its lowest ratings score since the index was launched, but was still the second most popular language after

, while in May 2020, C regained the top, and since then Java has substantially gone down in popularity while still maintaining number two position until November 2020, when

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

overtook Java, taking the number two position. In 2021, Java regained its number two position and in 2022, Python overtook both Java and C to become the most popular programming language. The TIOBE ''programming language of the year'' award goes to the language with the biggest annual popularity gain in the index, e.g., Go was the programming language of the year in 2016, and

won the award for 2020.

Criticisms

Maintainers specify that the TIOBE index is "not about the ''best'' programming language or the language in which ''most lines of code'' have been written", but do claim that the number of web pages may reflect the number of skilled engineers, courses and jobs worldwide. Pierre Carbonnelle challenges TIOBE's naming of

Objective-C Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXTS ...

as the "programming language of the year" in 2012, arguing that there may be many Objective-C pages on the web, but they are rarely read. It proposes its own PYPL index instead, based on Google Trends data. It shows popularity trends since 2004, worldwide and for 5 countries. Bjarne Stroustrup thinks TIOBE mostly measures "noise" and should report its findings in decibels rather than "popularity". Tim Bunce, author of the

Perl DBI In computing, the Perl DBI (Perl Database Interface) offers a standardized way for programmers using the Perl programming language to embed database communication within their programs. The latest DBI module for Perl from CPAN can run on a range o ...

, has been critical of the index and its methods of ranking.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:TIOBE Index Programming language topics