Every programmer in the world takes an interest in their favourite language or languages and how popular or unpopular it is. People have flame wars about the virtues of “their” programming language’s strengths and weaknesses. My favourites are C++, Delphi and PHP, but I go by the “Horses for Courses” adage- use the best tool for the job.

Just recently I came across the Tiobe survey, a monthly look at the popularity of Computer Languages by results for several search engines. It makes interesting reading and its surprising just how far ahead Java is from C#. Its good to see that C++ is increasing in popularity though long term (see the charts on Tiobe’s page it too is in a long term decline). I wonder how closely the survey relates to the job market. All the legacy code must have a big lag effect.

Sadly Delphi’s decline appears to be terminal. Borland’s decision to sell their IDE development part of the company off was the last nail in the coffin but many of the other nails there could be attributed back a few years to the Inprise episode when Borland changed name and not a little to Microsoft’s staff recruitment policies which saw them pinch Anders Hejlsberg, the architect of Turbo Pascal, Delphi and C#.

I did an “Programming Language by Jobs” survey a year ago and its probably time to do another so in a few days. This is done by counting the number of job vacancies for a given language in a country and dividing by 5 to get the true number of jobs. Watch this space!