Despite all the buzz about Node.js, JavaScript’s rating in the TIOBE Index declined 1.12% between January 2010 and January 2011. The TIOBE Index is calculated based on the number of search engine results for a particular language. Specifically, the phrase +” programming” is used. You can find out more about the methodology here.
Python saw the biggest growth, with +1.81% in 2010. Of the top 20 languages, PHP declined the most with a 2.24% drop.
What could account for JavaScript’s fall?
My first guess is that the increasing number of related projects diluted JavaScript search results. Developers may be posting more pages about Node.js or JQuery instead of “JavaScript Programming.” That could also be the reason Ruby is shown to be stagnant. TIOBE doesn’t count Ruby on Rails as a programming language, and that’s probably where most of Ruby’s growth is coming from.
Other notable results:
Lisp improved its ranking by +0.53%, Assembly improved by +0.86% and Pascal by +0.29%.
On the subject of Python, TIOBE wrote:
Python has become the “de facto” standard in system scripting (being a successor of Perl in this), but it is used for much more different types of application areas nowadays. Python is for instance very popular among web developers, especially in combination with the Django framework. Since Python is easy to learn, more and more universities are using Python to teach programming languages.
What do you think of TIOBE’s methodology?
