Language Use List: Groovy Enters Top-20; C Still on Top

Dramatic jumps over the past year have seen the Groovy language break into the top-20 list of programming languages, reaching the 18th spot, according to this month’s Tiobe index of programming language popularity. A dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine, Groovy has managed to jump over 35 spots since last year, when it was ranked at the 53rd position. Though its use percentage is at a miniscule 0.658 in Tiobe’s index, it’s still an impressive rise, given Groovy’s restricted field of use, mainly as an add-on to Java. Java, on the other hand, remained on second spot, with a 16.107 use percentage, dropping slightly since last month. Mostly holding onto its popularity thanks to the mobile development field and the success of Android. Java’s gradual decline is expected to stop in the coming months, when Java v8 becomes available, which among other innovations, is expected to unite Java’s two plaforms (Standard and Micro), thus offering a convergence of its various toolsets and will open up the language’s entire spectrum to developers. The C language held onto the top spot, raising its use percentage from last month’s 16.975, to a hefty 17.246. This puts C’s lead over Java at just over 1 percentile unit, while C is not expected to slow down any time soon, given its unflinching popularity, especially in small devices and appliances. Objective-C, the most popular option of building iPad and iPhone apps, ranked third with an 8.992 percentage, while C++ and PHP rounded out the top 5 with 8.664 and 6.094 percentage ratings respectively. Tiobe, one of the leading programming-language use rankers, gathers its statistics by examining search engines and sites such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and Wikipedia in order to determine the number of engineers, courses and vendors consistently using each language.

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