After a year-and-a-half in second place, behind the C
language, Java surged back into first place in this month's Tiobe
language popularity index. Topping the Tiobe Index again is being
attributed to Java's usage in Android application development.
"Android's ongoing success is probably the major reason for
Java's revival," a report accompanying the index said. "The Java
language has been in slow decline for many years now, mainly due to its
waning footprint in the enterprise server back end market. Since October
last year, the increasing demand on Java Android programming has
exceeded this decline, thus pushing Java more than 3 percent during this
period."
Java's rating this month was 16.041 percent; in October it was 13.506 percent. A previous surge by Java, in February 2013,
also was attributed to Android.
Tiobe's index is compiled based on a formula that assesses searches on languages in various search engines.
Java's rise is not seen as a one-time anomaly by Tiobe
Managing Director Paul Jansen, who compiles the index. "I don't think
this is a fluke. Java is now really catching up because of Android's
continuing success," he said in an email. Although
Java was revitalized last year with Java 8 and its functional capabilities, Jansen does not view this as a factor in Java's retaking the top spot.
Java also holds the top spot in the rival PyPL Popularity of
Programming Language index, where it has a 24.3 percent share this
month -- the same share it had last month. The PyPL index examines how
often language tutorials are searched on in Google.
Also moving up in the Tiobe index this month was Scala,
an object-oriented functional language for the Java Virtual Machine that now
can be compiled to JavaScript as well, via the Scala.js compiler. "The
functional programming language jumps to position 25 after having been
between position 30 and 50 for many years. Scala seems to be ready to
enter the top 20 for the first time in history," Tiobe's report said.
Jansen said he would have expected to see Scala in the top
20 a long time ago. "There has been a positive vibe on Scala for many
years now, but industry was a bit reluctant to adopt Scala because it
wasn't mainstream yet and functional programming languages such as Scala
were considered academic toy languages until recently. Now we see that
multinationals are trying out Scala for some of their development."
Rounding out the top 5 in Tiobe's index were C (15.745
percent), C++ (6.962 percent), Objective-C (5.89 percent), and C# (4.947
percent). Finishing from second to fifth place in the PyPL index were
PHP (11.4 percent), Python (10.7 percent), C# (8.8 percent), and C++ (8
percent).
This story, "Java regains spot as most popular language in developer index" was originally published by
InfoWorld.
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