Thursday, 6 January 2005

PHP: The Programming Language of 2004

TIOBE Software, maintainer of the TIOBE Programming Community Index has named PHP the Programming language of 2004. The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. PHP has grown over 3%, while Java has dropped a relatively steep 6%. According to TIOBE's January newsletter, the launch of PHP version 5 is generally regarded as a further step to maturity. It is expected that PHP will be capable to maintain its top 4 position for a long time. Suprisingly, C is runner up thanks to the addition of MSN.com as an extra data provider. Delphi and Python are third and fourth best respectively.

The TIOBE index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. In order to minimize fluctuations of the index, www.msn.com is now also used as a search engine to measure programming language popularity. Both C and Java take most advantage of this change, whereas PHP loses a couple of percents.