TIOBE Software compiles a monthly statistic of the most popular programming languages. Here, they explain it better than I can let’s just rip some off from their web page.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TPC index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

And of course no story about statistics is complete without a stolen graph.

The graph shows the long term trends in the top 10 languages. If you visit the page they give you the top 20 in a nice table and the next 80 spread throughout the page.

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