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ing. Ivo Jansch CTO |
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| Ivo is the CTO of Ibuildings. He implements company strategy regarding tools, technology and development processes. Ivo is the contact for several key customers and partners, and a regular speaker at conferences. |
Monday, September 21. 2009PHP enters top 3 of most popular programming languages
The company TIOBE, founded in 2000, is involved heavily with Software Quality. They call themselves 'the coding standards company' and deliver tools to assess the quality of software by checking coding standards, among other things. Unfortunately, despite the fact that their website is written in PHP, they do not support PHP yet with their tools (at least as far as I can tell from their website), but they have one activity that is of interest to us in the PHP ecosystem: they collect statistics on the popularity of programming languages and have been doing this for a few years now.
In their latest analysis PHP has entered the top 3 of most popular programming languages, and that is something that both makes us proud and provides further proof that PHP is still growing and here to stay.  The results are calculated according to an elaborate indexing mechanism. One odd thing about the index is that ASP.net, in my perception still quite popular, seems to be missing from the index completely. What makes PHP's number 3 position remarkable is that the numbers 1 and 2 are very much general purpose languages. Java and C are pretty much used from anywhere from low level processes to desktop applications. PHP on the other hand is very much focused on the web. So this probably means that it's not just PHP that's growing, but probably the web in general compared to non-web development. The language that is growing the most in the index is Objective-C (at position 18, up from 42 last year). This is the result of the iPhone's popularity: Objective-C is the language for iPhone App developers. Pascal's comeback (at 12, up from 18) is remarkable as well; I'm not sure if this is due to popular applications such as Skype that are written in Object Pascal or just based on a general trend of reviving things from the eighties. In any case, this months Tiobe index is something to definitely be proud of. Share         Comments
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QUOTE: One odd thing about the index is that ASP.net, in my perception still quite popular, seems to be missing from the index completely. ASP.net is a framework; you can use different languages within ASP.net. Most people use C# but Vbscript is also a possibility. So I think that explains it 
Oops, I've even yelled "Rails is a framework, Ruby is a language!" at people in the past so I should've known. I stand corrected.
So this probably means that it's not just PHP that's growing, but probably the web in general compared to non-web development.
If that was the reason, one wouldn't expect Javascript's share to grow even more, and certainly not decline. Javascript is a perfect indicator for an increased shift to web development. My personal guess would be a shift is being caused by PHP increasingly being used to replace older web applications build on old school "enterprisey" platforms. This may also coincide with companies shifting web development from internal IT-departments (which mostly favor Java/.NET) to smaller web companies (that tend prefer PHP/Ruby).
In the FAQ of the tiobe.com page, we can read :
ASP and ASP.NET are also not programming languages because they make use of other languages such as JavaScript and VBScript or .NET compatible language
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2009-09-21 18:08
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