Short Bytes: According to the Tiobe Programming Community Index update for the month of August, the C programming language has shown the lowest popularity rating in the history of the Tiobe index. It has obtained a score of 11.303% and gathered second place in the index behind Java.
Tiobe Programming Community Index is created by observing the search frequency various programming languages on search engines that meet Tiobe’s eligibility criteria. The search queries which include the name of a language and the term “programming” are considered for calculations.
Also, there is an eligibility criterion for the programming languages. To be considered, a language must be Turing Complete. It should have a Wikipedia page along with more than 5000 Google search hits as per the described search query format. The ratings are then calculated using the gathered data and a formula.
Originally created between 1969 to 1973 by Dennis Ritchie, C language became a synonym for programming. It has been in existence for more than 40 years and is proudly continuing its journey. The biggest benefits offered by C are its cross-platform availability and portability.
C is a structured language, yet, it manages to give a neck to neck fight to OOP languages like Java and C++. An added advantage is that it is simple to learn than other cosmopolitan languages. The old and beautiful language maybe be finding it hard to withstand the flood of all the newer languages which more advanced.
“One of the main reasons for this drop is that C is hardly suitable for the booming fields of the web and mobile app development,” Tiobe’s post reads. The company believes that the lack of proper backing force–like Oracle for Java, Microsoft for C++ and C#–behind C has contributed to the slowness of the development process of the open source language.
Coming back to the index, Java clearly leads, with a rating of 19%, as the most popular programming language. Although, a slight drop is visible in its popularity. It’s good to see that the newer languages Swift and Golang have managed to get a place in the Programming Community Index. Looking at the graphs trends of the index the years, only C and Java remained as the topmost popular programming languages and are competing with each other.
Also Read: Top 5 Highest Paying Programming Languages of 2016
Here’s the complete list of the most popular programming languages, according to Tiobe:
| Aug 2016 | Aug 2015 | Change | Programming Language | Ratings | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Java | 19.010% | -0.26% | |
| 2 | 2 | C | 11.303% | -3.43% | |
| 3 | 3 | C++ | 5.800% | -1.94% | |
| 4 | 4 | C# | 4.907% | +0.07% | |
| 5 | 5 | Python | 4.404% | +0.34% | |
| 6 | 7 |
|
PHP | 3.173% | +0.44% |
| 7 | 9 |
|
JavaScript | 2.705% | +0.54% |
| 8 | 8 | Visual Basic .NET | 2.518% | -0.19% | |
| 9 | 10 |
|
Perl | 2.511% | +0.39% |
| 10 | 12 |
|
Assembly language | 2.364% | +0.60% |
| 11 | 14 |
|
Delphi/Object Pascal | 2.278% | +0.87% |
| 12 | 13 |
|
Ruby | 2.278% | +0.86% |
| 13 | 11 |
|
Visual Basic | 2.046% | +0.26% |
| 14 | 17 |
|
Swift | 1.983% | +0.80% |
| 15 | 6 |
|
Objective-C | 1.884% | -1.31% |
| 16 | 37 |
|
Groovy | 1.637% | +1.27% |
| 17 | 20 |
|
R | 1.605% | +0.60% |
| 18 | 15 |
|
MATLAB | 1.538% | +0.31% |
| 19 | 19 | PL/SQL | 1.349% | +0.21% | |
| 20 | 95 |
|
Go | 1.270% | +1.19% |
— Via Tiobe
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