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Dr. Axel Rauschmayer is a freelance software engineer, blogger and educator, located in Munich, Germany. Axel is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 246 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website. View Full User Profile

Guess what programming language grew most in popularity in 2010?

01.22.2011
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TIOBE Software published its annual TIOBE Programming Community Index. The ranks are lead by the usual suspects Java, C, C++, and PHP. But the language that grew most in popularity in 2010 was a bit of a surprise: Python. Also surprising: JavaScript’s popularity declined. With Node and webapps spreading, I expect that trend to reverse this year. The index is computed as follows (detailed definition).

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, MSN, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and YouTube 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.

 

From http://www.2ality.com/2011/01/guess-what-programming-language-grew.html

Published at DZone with permission of Axel Rauschmayer, author and DZone MVB.

(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)

Comments

Jacek Furmankiewicz replied on Sat, 2011/01/22 - 10:12am

It's only a surprise if you haven't actually used Python. It's a great little language that can.

After prototyping with Django, going back to JSF/Wicket/whatever was like going back to the stone age.

And after trying BDD with the Python Freshen library, we decided to drop writing integration tests for our Java server apps in JUnit and do them in Freshen instead. Much less code, much more productivity.

We keep Java on the server side where raw speed is important and for everything else (web CRUD screens, integration testing, migration scripts, etc.) we're going all Python. It's easy to learn, read and comes with just as many libraries as Java if not more. Much easier to use too.

Shameless plug: check out my Maven BDD plugin...we use it to run Freshen BDD tests as part of mvn integration test

Axel Rauschmayer replied on Sat, 2011/01/22 - 10:54am in response to: Jacek Furmankiewicz

I love Python! But I expected "popular" languages such as Ruby and JavaScript to grow more, so apparently it has found its "niche" (not the right word, considering how highly ranked it is). I just wish Python had as good an IDE as Eclipse, which is the main reason that I still use Java so much.

Jacek Furmankiewicz replied on Sat, 2011/01/22 - 11:42am in response to: Axel Rauschmayer

PyDev is pretty good. And then there's always vim :-)

Otengi Miloskov replied on Sat, 2011/01/22 - 8:31pm

PyDev Eclipse plguin even have refactory stuff, Komodo IDE or Editor 6 its awesome for Python development with debugger and many features, emacs with Python mode is awesome, Spyder is a complete ide for Python development and have PyQt and scientific features http://packages.python.org/spyder/ and as Jacek said Vim also good. There is tons of libs and tools for Python, Give a shot to Python and you will see what is capable of it. Python is more wide used in many fields as scientific, graphics, games, desktop, data analysis, web. Ruby it is more used on web and not so much in other fields so I think thats why Python is more popular because not just for web development but anything you can imagine. If I need speed always I drop some lines of C or C++, even this days I dont use a lot Java as before just for some projects because all that Oracle fiasco's lately.

Putra Dedy replied on Sun, 2011/01/23 - 11:06am

I guess,

phython and java are still the best and the most popular program

http://www.rajomedia.com

othman El moulat replied on Sun, 2011/01/23 - 1:12pm

why Python popularity this year was a surprise for you?isn't Python a powerfull and well designed language? and it is not monopolized by those giant IT weirdos companies like what oracle did to java.

Python will be growing in future . it is being choosed by CS universities departments to introduce students into programming. and it has a great community activity. it is simple ,open, free and community driven. it is enough to make it the next choice of most programmers.

Axel Rauschmayer replied on Sun, 2011/01/23 - 6:24pm

Note that this index ranks popularity as in market demand. This is not the same as ranking the beauty of a language. If it was a beauty contest then, for example, Python would (IMHO) not be behind C++.

James Selvakumar replied on Sun, 2011/01/23 - 7:28pm

If there were a beauty contest for programming languages, my vote would certainly go for Python.

Disclaimer: Java is my primary language and that's why I chose Python ;-)

Jacek Furmankiewicz replied on Sun, 2011/01/23 - 7:53pm

Let's not go overboard :-)
Python is great for "glue" and small tasks, but the GIL and its interpreted nature still make it far slower than Java. I wouldn't write a large enterprise system in Python...Java is still best for that. But for everything else Python is a great fit.

Armin Ehrenreich replied on Mon, 2011/01/24 - 2:59am in response to: Axel Rauschmayer

I don't think this index has anything to do with "demand". It is just communication about something. (Counting YouTube clips and the like). Additionally there is nothing said on the exact algorithm. With Python for example how to exclude the snakes from counting the programming language.
A few months ago "D" was very high ranked, then "Go" although I never heard of someone using them for something real (beside playing around). So maybe you can call it a kind of "hype index". If you want to see demand then look on something like this:
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=Java%2C+C%23%2C+C%2B%2B%2C+Python&l=

Otengi Miloskov replied on Mon, 2011/01/24 - 12:55pm in response to: Jacek Furmankiewicz

If you have problems with the GIL just use PyPy or Jython. Also 90% of our projects are small to medium size so Python fits very well, Large enterprise systems are very rare this days unless you work for a big investment bank and also takes so long to develop it but in that you are right just in that case Java still the champion but for everything else Python does very well.

JeffS replied on Mon, 2011/01/24 - 1:55pm in response to: Jacek Furmankiewicz

The Python Netbeans plugin is also excellent. Also, there is DrPython, a wxPython app/ide that's pretty nice.

Marc Stock replied on Thu, 2011/01/27 - 6:19pm

Try PyCharm

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