p. You may remember a previous article of mine where I introduced the JIPLFOG (Jayson’s Index for Programming Languages Found on Google). Now just one month later Google has responded with support for my efforts. Google Trends popped out of the Google hatch yesterday *just* so that I could publish charts and have a real-time update for JIPLFOG. I can’t thank them enough.

The TIOBE Programming Community Index has been updated for April 2006 showing their view on the status of programming languages in the development community. PHP moves up a spot from 5th to 4th. The long-in-the-tooth C fades back a bit relinquishing 1st place to Java, while C++ gains on its brethren with PHP biting on its heels (a margin of 0.02 between their percentages). PHP has a higher climb rate so expect another big move in the coming year.

But then again, what does this mean? How does TIBOE decide this index?

Let’s take a look at their analysis model and create our own to see what happens…