Most Popular Programming Language

As a programmer, we often wonder about the top or most used or most popular programming languages in the world.

It is very difficult to get the exact number of users for any programming language. Many of us use multiple programming languages. The more experience you have, the more programming languages you use. The more programs you write or work with, the chances of using more languages rise. The larger the company, the more languages you’re likely to use.

In this article, I will try to get a general overview of the top programming languages and where they rank as of 2012 and 2013.

The Top 3

If you look at the popularity of the top 3 programming languages in the past decade, Java is the clear winner. With Java, if you compare C and C++ programmers, we will find even more users. Now, the use of these three languages, C, C++, and Java have nothing to do with the company or platform. The C language may be used by a Microsoft developer, a Java developer and even a Google developer.

However, the year 2013 has been a clear year of HTML and JavaScript. So, year 2014 and 2015 may tell a different story.

Based on the research and statistics by Udemy, TIOBE, and langpop, the C and Java are neck to neck in the race for f popularity.

The Top 10

Based on the udemy and a few other online publications, the top 10 programming languages based on their popularity and use are listed below.

1. Java
2. C
3. C++
4. C#
5. Objective-C
6. PHP
7. Python
8. Ruby
9. SQL
10. JavaScript

The website Langpop.com that is dedicated to programming languages and their popularity shows slightly different statistics. The following chart shows the normalized comparison from the data based on various categories from various online websites.



As you may see from the preceding chart, the languages C and Java are clearly the leaders.

Here is a list of the popularity index announced by the TIOBE Software.

1. C (17.89%)
2. Java (17.31%)
3. Objective-C (10.20%)
4. C++ (8.26%)
5. C# (5.6%)
6. PHP (5.28%)
7. Basic (3.75%)
8. Python (2.21%)
9. SQL (1.87%)
10. JavaScript (1.85%)

Here



PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language Index

Pierre Carbonnelle has created a PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language index that analyzes how often people have searched for language tutorials in Google. The raw data comes from Google Trends.

Based on Pierre’s report, Java, PHP, and Python have the top 3 positions. The 4th position is taken by C# followed by C++ and C for 5th and 6th positions. JavaScript, Objective-C, Visual Basic, and Ruby are the next 4 most popular in the list.

Summary

Clearly, C and Java are the most popular programming languages as of today. But it has nothing to do with the productivity. In my next article, I will focus on the best programming languages and the most productive programming languages.