Objective-C, the language used for developing applications to run on Apple’s mobile devices, was ranked the third most-popular language in the July edition of the Tiobe Programming Community Index, followed by C++ in fourth place. Released this week, the index has Objective-C used by 9.335 percent of developers and C++ used by 9.118 percent. The two languages swap rankings from last month, when C++ was used by 9.358 percent of developers and Objective-C by 9.094 percent.
“Both Objective-C and C++ started in 1983 as object-oriented successors of the C languages,” said Tiobe in its monthly report. “Right from the beginning, Objective-C and C++ competed to become the de facto object-oriented programming language. It took quite some years before C++ could claim victory. Now Objective-C is back (thanks to the iPhone and iPad), but not as a direct competitor of C++ any more. C++ is used heavily in large high-performance systems whereas Objective-C is mainly used in the mobile apps industry.”
The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. Analyses of other sites, such as Wikipedia, Amazon, and YouTube, also are factored into the assessment.
However, Tiobe’s rankings recently came under fire from PHP advocate Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend Technologies, who questioned their accuracy. PHP, which was once the third-most popular programming language, now stands a distant 7th.
C maintained the top spot in this month’s index, used by 18.331 percent of developers, while Java again comes in second place, used by 16.087 percent of developers.
Below is the list of the 20 most popular programming languages.
Source: computerworlduk.com
