In the latest update of the Tiobe programming language popularity index, JavaScript has its best ranking ever: it’s in sixth place with a 3.514 percent rating. Last month, Tiobe named JavaScript the programming language of the year for 2014 because it had improved the most during the past twelve months.
Objective-C, which used to be the primary language for mobile development firms building iOS apps, is declining sharply. It dropped from third place to fourth place on the index, a result of Apple introducing Swift as a new language for building iPhone and iPad apps. “The strange thing is that Swift is gaining traction but not as much as Objective-C is dropping,” said Paul Jansen, Tiobe managing director. “Some market share of Objective-C might also go to Java because Android is getting more popular than iOS.”
The top ten on the Tiobe list for February are C (16.49 percent), Java (15.35 percent), C++ (6.61 percent), Objective-C (6.02 percent), C# (5.74 percent), JavaScript (3.51 percent), PHP (3.17 percent), Python (2.88 percent), Visual Basic .NET (2.03 percent) and Visual Basic (1.72 percent).