TIOBE index

TIOBE programming community index is a measure of popularity of programming languages, created and maintained by the TIOBE Company based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. TIOBE stands for "The Importance Of Being Earnest" which is taken from the name of a comedy play written by Oscar Wilde at the end of the nineteenth century. The index is calculated from number of search engine results for queries containing the name of the language. The index covers searches in Google, Google Blogs, MSN, Yahoo!, Baidu, Wikipedia and YouTube. The index is updated once a month. The current information is free but the long term statistics over many years of observation is for sale. The index authors think that it may be valuable when accepting various strategic decisions. TIOBE focuses on Turing complete languages, so it does not provide information about the popularity of, for instance, SQL or HTML.

According to the site, TIOBE index is "not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written". However the site does claim that the number of web pages may reflect the number of skilled engineers, courses and jobs worldwide.