Objective-C has won TIOBE's Programming Language Award for the second consecutive time! The award is given to the programming language that gained most market share in 2012. The market share of Objective-C is 3.37% higher than it was in January 2012. The major cause of Objective-C's win is of course the booming business of mobile phone application development.
Other interesting moves of 2012 are the renaissance of C++ (+1.09%, boosted by Microsoft) and Python (+0.96%). On the other hand, C# (-2.57%, due to its late entrance in the mobile market) and Delphi (-0.65%) lost considerable market share.
So what is going the happen in 2013? The mobile phone application market will certainly continue to grow and dominate the index. It is expected that Java (Android) and C++/C# (Windows Mobile) will regain popularity. Objective-C seems to be at its top, especially because this language is hardly used for anything else. The dark horses for 2013 are JavaScript and MATLAB. JavaScript because it is playing an ever more important role in almost any program nowadays and MATLAB because it has become the de facto standard for numerical computing the last couple of years.
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 Jan 2013 | Position Jan 2012 | Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Jan 2013 | Delta Jan 2012 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 |  | C | 17.855% | +0.89% | A |
| 2 | 1 |  | Java | 17.417% | -0.05% | A |
| 3 | 5 | | Objective-C | 10.283% | +3.37% | A |
| 4 | 4 |  | C++ | 9.140% | +1.09% | A |
| 5 | 3 | | C# | 6.196% | -2.57% | A |
| 6 | 6 | | PHP | 5.546% | -0.16% | A |
| 7 | 7 | | (Visual) Basic | 4.749% | +0.23% | A |
| 8 | 8 | | Python | 4.173% | +0.96% | A |
| 9 | 9 | | Perl | 2.264% | -0.50% | A |
| 10 | 10 | | JavaScript | 1.976% | -0.34% | A |
| 11 | 12 | | Ruby | 1.775% | +0.34% | A |
| 12 | 24 | | Visual Basic .NET | 1.043% | +0.56% | A |
| 13 | 13 | | Lisp | 0.953% | -0.16% | A |
| 14 | 14 | | Pascal | 0.932% | +0.14% | A |
| 15 | 11 | | Delphi/Object Pascal | 0.919% | -0.65% | A |
| 16 | 17 | | Ada | 0.651% | +0.02% | B |
| 17 | 23 | | MATLAB | 0.641% | +0.13% | B |
| 18 | 20 | | Lua | 0.633% | +0.07% | B |
| 19 | 21 | | Assembly | 0.629% | +0.08% | B |
| 20 | 72 | | Bash | 0.613% | +0.49% | B |
