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I need to find figures that show how many programmers world wide, has each of the following languages as their primary programming language.

C
C++
C#
Object-C
Java
JavaScript
VB.NET
VB6 (or older)
VBA
PHP
flash scripts
Ruby

Does anyone know of such comparison figures?

If not. Do you know of a good way to research this? I could compare the number of tags here at stackoverflow and the number of articles for each language at sites like codeproject. This would give me a good idea. But if you can suggest other ideas how to find these numbers I will be greatfull.

/Thomas

Ahmad Shahbaz
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Thomas3D
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    Could we remove the subjective tag? A figure can never be subjective. It could (and likely will) be subjectively interpreted, but this is not part of the question. – Foxfire Oct 15 '09 at 08:47

5 Answers5

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A very common site that does this is the TIOBE index. It basically searches for programming languages in major search engines and compares the results, and it shows you some history. The only problem is that C/C++/C# are not distinguished very well, therefore C is more dominant than you'd expect (not to mention that search results include many pages where many languages are listed, like programming FAQs). But in general, TIOBE gives a good idea, I think, and it should get better, since at least Google tends to know the difference between zero, two or four pluses.

OregonGhost
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Have you tried TIOBE index?

Michał Niklas
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In general this is hard to measure because every approach has a lot of drawbacks.

TIOBE and others that are based on search results e.g. do not tell anything of what is actually used but just what is highly ranked by google (You can even see that just Google changing a bit of their results in 2004/2005 completely mixed TIOBE). And moreover they have the problem that lots of search-terms are ambiguous (Like Java which IS also an island, Ruby which also exists as gem, Python which is a snake and others which have alternative meaning). Another problem with search based is that most things put into the web stay up forever which means it is irrelevant if it is CURRENTLY interesting. If a C resource was put up in 2002 it likely still is available today (which hugely overrates leading or older languages.)

Here one is an interesting approach based on the number of book sales. (This at least eliminates the ambigous problem, but comes with others.)

Wikipedia also has a small article about the topic.

Foxfire
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    I agree, you shouldn't take any programming language popularity index too literally. – Jesper Oct 15 '09 at 08:47
  • High number of book sales might mean that a language is too complicated to learn without a book as well :D – OregonGhost Oct 15 '09 at 09:00
  • @OregonGhost this might very well be the case. On the other hand the same thing will be true for web resources so I don't see any bias into any direction. Also there are a lot of things that factor into web indices (e.g. JavaDoc by default creates HTML and is often put online in that form), but less for books. But the question was (fortunatelly) not about the interpretaiton, just about the numbers. – Foxfire Oct 15 '09 at 09:07
  • Agree. In general it's not worse than with web resources. On the other hand, web resources tend to stay, while books are released more for recent topics (or for hypes). But then, you could examine the release dates of the web resources. If all compilers would be commercial, you could just view the sales of the compilers ;) – OregonGhost Oct 15 '09 at 09:43
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Try Google trends (see an example). In addition, check sites like freshmeat.net and note the number of projects in each language. That's only open source projects and many people will use a different language for their hobby projects than at work (i.e. one that sucks less).

Next, look for sites which offer job openings. I don't have a good link handy but this Google query should get your started.

Aaron Digulla
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  • Dear all. I have read all the answers above and done a little bit of research for all of them. I think it is a very good idea to search for job openings as Aaron Digulla suggest. In fact that result in a very similar result to what stackoverflow tags provide. I have compiled my findings in to this pdf: [Programming Language Popularity][1] [1]: http://www.3djam.dk/download/LanguagePopularity.pdf – Thomas3D Oct 15 '09 at 12:42
  • Please add this to your question and how about giving me a +1 for this? :) – Aaron Digulla Oct 15 '09 at 13:48
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not yet!!!!!!! That's only open source projects and many people will use a different language for their hobby projects than at work (i.e. one that sucks less).

Next, look for sites which offer job openings. I don't have a good link handy but this Google query should get your started.

Yogesh Marakana
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