In any career, it's a good idea to keep track of trends in your industry. This holds especially true in relatively young fields with rapid change, such as software development (consider that some of the most popular languages today — Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Visual Basic, C# — were created only in the last decade).

One good resource for keeping track of programming trends is the TIOBE Programming Community Index, a monthly ranking of the 50 most popular programming languages. The index's rankings are based on “the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors” as well as search engine results.

In this month's index, the people at TIOBE have declared Ruby and D as the “hot languages of today” , with Ruby coming ever closer to a spot in the top 10 and D making a significant climb. Here's how the top 20 languages stack up for September 2006:

Position Sep 2006	Position Sep 2005	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings Sep 2006	Delta Sep 2005	Status
1	1		Java	21.532%	-0.91%	A
2	2		C	18.059%	-1.10%	A
3	3		C++	10.753%	-0.41%	A
4	6		(Visual) Basic	10.627%	+4.12%	A
5	5		PHP	9.128%	+0.23%	A
6	4		Perl	5.430%	-3.84%	A
7	8		Python	3.144%	+0.11%	A
8	7		C#	2.992%	-0.30%	A
9	9		JavaScript	2.442%	+0.67%	A
10	10		Delphi	2.105%	+0.43%	A
11	11		SAS	1.933%	+0.63%	A
12	12		PL/SQL	1.038%	+0.08%	A
13	27	14 *	Ruby	0.938%	+0.65%	A-
14	14		Lisp/Scheme	0.649%	-0.07%	B
15	13		COBOL	0.562%	-0.29%	B
16	30	14 *	D	0.554%	+0.32%	B
17	19		ABAP	0.552%	+0.16%	B
18	21		Visual FoxPro	0.550%	+0.21%	A–
19	16		Ada	0.536%	0.00%	B
20	18		Pascal	0.516%	+0.04%	B

Posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 4:03 pm by Tucows.
Filed under: Programming.
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