TIOBE has declared Python the programming language of 2007 after Python showed the largest increase in ratings in a one year period. TIOBE’s Programming Community Index aims to give an idea of the popularity of the top programming languages.
There are some very interesting metrics on the table on the front page as well. Visual Basic has actually moved up a place in popularity since this time last year and I think the change bears a lot in common with possible reasons for Python’s popularity. It’s a very human readable language, just like Python. It’s also increasingly OO friendly with the latest refresh of the language even bringing with it extensions for Lambdas and of course Microsoft’s Language INtegrated Query (LINQ) technology.
Also of interest is Ruby. The wunderkind of 2006 has actually lost places since the same time last year in the TIOBE index, which is accurately mirroring a number of very visible commentaries on the web lately documenting reasons why high profile developers and teams have switched away from that language. Ruby remains an extremely elegant, almost Zen like development language, but a language habitually plagued with poor performance. Rails, the reason for Ruby’s explosive growth in recent years, also complicates matters adding a great deal of behind the scenes ‘magic’ that’s far from the explicit nature of code written in Visual Basic or Python.
