AMSTERDAM, 9th of December 2009 - SIG announced the launch of the Twitter Language Popularity (TWILP). (www.sig.eu/en/TWILP/Trends). This service tracks the popularity of the world’s 10 most mentioned programming languages. Is a programming language popularity waning? Is a new language gaining ground? These questions can be answered using TWILP.
In the Internet age, software technologies are always on the verge of being obsolete. They may be superseded by newer, greater technologies. Companies building software must act on this, to prevent their code base from becoming obsolete.
“We built this service to create an additional source of information when making decisions on software technology”, says Tobias Kuipers (@tk300), CTO of SIG. “The results genuinely surprised us. In the top 10 we find a couple of languages we surely expected, such as Java, PHP, Python and Ruby. What we did not expect was that Delphi is solidly in the top 10, as we do not encounter it often in the field. What is even more surprising is the absence of C# from the top 10.”
“It appears the top 10 favours languages that operate mainly on the web and user-interface side of the development spectrum. Languages that are used mainly for back-office or embedded programming, such as COBOL or ABAP are lower on the list. C++ is a notable exception, as it hovers around place 9 in the top 10.”
The top 10 at midnight on December 3rd was as follows:
1. PHP (1995, Canada)
2. Java (1995, USA)
3. JavaScript (1995, USA)
4. Ruby (1995, Japan)
5. Python (1989, Netherlands)
6. VisualBasic (1991, USA)
7. Delphi (1994, USA)
8. Perl (1987, USA)
9. C++ (1983, USA)
10. ActionScript (2000, USA)
“It appears that a programming language needs an incubation time of 15 years to become truly popular. That, or 1995 was just a great year for programming languages”, says Kuipers.
“The TWILP service ranks languages according to popularity of the tweets they are mentioned in”, says Miguel Ferreira (@miguel_f), research engineer in charge of developing the service. “We take the number of mentions and multiply them by the number of followers the author of the tweet has”. “For instance, C# has a lot of mentions, but the people talking about C# don’t have that many followers, so it doesn’t reach the top 10.” Ferreira continues: “This also explains the peaks in the charts: On 30 November JavaScript was briefly the most popular language as Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) (who has over 1 million followers) mentioned it twice, sending it way up to number 1.”
SIG will continue to track programming language popularity and create periodic analysis of changes that will occur.
If you have any questions on this or other SIG services, please contact Tobias Kuipers at
t.kuipers@sig.eu or @tk300.
About SIG
The Software Improvement Group (SIG) provides insight into and analysis of the quality of software systems. We make sure that our customers gain and retain control of their IT landscape. Our analysis software allows us to measure quality, to lay bare the underlying architecture and to assess the system. All this is done on the basis of automated source code analysis. SIG’s roots lie in the CWI: Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica. From the Amsterdam office we serve clients around Europe. Get insight, get in control.
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Note to the editors
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