TIOBE Programming Community Index for August 2012

August Headline: Where is C# heading?

Microsoft's C# programming language shows a downward trend for 8 months now. What is happening? On the one hand C# is generally recognized as the enterprise language with most modern and expressive features available today and C# has shown more downward trends in the past and always recovered from this. But, Microsoft announced recently the revival of C++ (in favor of C#) within its company. C# appeared to be too high level to build high performance systems. This is confirmed by what we see happening to TIOBE's embedded software customers: after years of enthusiastic adoption of C#, there is now no significant growth any more. Let's see what happens to C# the next few months.
The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.

Position Aug 2012	Position Aug 2011	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings Aug 2012	Delta Aug 2011	Status
1	2		C	18.937%	+1.55%	A
2	1		Java	16.352%	-3.06%	A
3	6		Objective-C	9.540%	+4.05%	A
4	3		C++	9.333%	+0.90%	A
5	5		C#	6.590%	+0.55%	A
6	4		PHP	5.524%	-0.61%	A
7	7		(Visual) Basic	5.334%	+0.32%	A
8	8		Python	3.876%	+0.46%	A
9	9		Perl	2.273%	-0.04%	A
10	12		Ruby	1.691%	+0.36%	A
11	10		JavaScript	1.365%	-0.19%	A
12	13		Delphi/Object Pascal	1.012%	-0.06%	A
13	14		Lisp	0.975%	+0.07%	A
14	26		Visual Basic .NET	0.877%	+0.41%	A
15	15		Transact-SQL	0.849%	+0.03%	A
16	18		Pascal	0.793%	+0.13%	A
17	11		Lua	0.726%	-0.64%	A--
18	16		Ada	0.649%	-0.05%	B
19	22		PL/SQL	0.610%	+0.08%	B
20	29		MATLAB	0.533%	+0.09%	B