I’m going to try to combine data from 5 different sources to come up with a unified top 10 list of programming languages for 2015:
| # | OVERALL | Tiobe | RedMonk | IEEE | Stack Overflow | GitHub |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Java | Java | JS | Java | JS | JS |
| 2 | JS | C | Java | C | SQL* | Java |
| 3 | C++ | C++ | PHP | C++ | Java | Ruby |
| 4 | Python | Python | Python | Python | C# | PHP |
| 5 | PHP | C# | C# | C# | PHP | Python |
| 6 | C | PHP | C++ | R | Python | CSS* |
| 7 | C# | VB.NET | Ruby | PHP | C++ | C++ |
| 8 | Ruby | JS | CSS* | JS | C | C# |
| 9 | R | Perl | C | Ruby | Node.js | C |
| 10 | VB.NET | Ruby | Objective C | Matlab | AngularJS | HTML* |
* indicates non programming languages (SQL is used to write database queries, CSS is used to define style sheets, and HTML is use to mark up web pages). Node.js and AngularJS are frameworks used for JS (JavaScript) programming. They should be considered part of JS.
It’s surprising that JS (JavaScript) is so low in the Tiobe and IEEE top ten lists, since almost all client side web UI is being written in it these days. Their low scores may come from only considering whole systems written in JS. I’m not sure.
R and VB.Net are also outliers. The former shows up as #13 on the RedMonk list, the latter at #19. R is a mathematical language, which explains why it shows up so high on the IEEE’s list. VB.NET seems to have replaced ASP.NET as Microsoft’s answer to PHP.
There are a number of languages that have fallen out of the top ten. Perl continues its long slide from top spot among the P languages (Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby), and Objective C, the language of native IOS applications, has fallen far and fast, dropping from #3 last year on Tiobe’s list to #15 this year.
