There is hardly any doubt about it, Java will become TIOBE's programming language of the year 2015. The steep fall of Objective-C of almost 8% this year seems to be completely absorbed by the most popular language at the moment. More about Java next month. Another interesting move concerns the rise of Python. It is currently at its all time high position. It is easy to learn, available everywhere and embraced by industry. Python is the current standard in scripting.

The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.

Dec 2015	Dec 2014	Change	Programming Language	Ratings	Change
1	2		Java	20.973%	+6.01%
2	1		C	16.460%	-1.13%
3	4		C++	5.943%	-0.16%
4	8		Python	4.429%	+2.14%
5	5		C#	4.114%	-0.21%
6	6		PHP	2.792%	+0.05%
7	9		Visual Basic .NET	2.390%	+0.16%
8	7		JavaScript	2.363%	-0.07%
9	10		Perl	2.209%	+0.38%
10	18		Ruby	2.061%	+1.08%
11	32		Assembly language	1.926%	+1.40%
12	11		Visual Basic	1.654%	-0.15%
13	16		Delphi/Object Pascal	1.639%	+0.52%
14	17		Swift	1.405%	+0.34%
15	3		Objective-C	1.357%	-7.77%
16	20		MATLAB	1.168%	+0.30%
17	15		Pascal	1.147%	-0.03%
18	12		R	1.122%	-0.51%
19	14		PL/SQL	1.103%	-0.23%
20	26		COBOL	0.828%	+0.17%