Mooning Again

Since I last mentioned the Lua programming language in these pages, it has seen a surge in visibility. Yes, I know that is a coincidence, because I am pretty sure I don't have enough readers of my random musings to have had an effect.

But it is interesting to see that it has sustained its place in the TIOBE top 20 at the respectable position of #15 this month. Since TIOBE doesn't appear to keep an archive of each month's scoreboard, here is the list as of August, 2007:

Rank	Language	Ratings
1	Java	21.768%
2	C	15.699%
3	Visual Basic	10.646%
4	C++	10.111%
5	PHP	9.696%
6	Perl	5.320%
7	C#	3.987%
8	Python	2.749%
9	JavaScript	2.575%
10	Ruby	1.906%
11	PL/SQL	1.833%
12	SAS	1.389%
13	D	1.251%
14	Delphi	1.222%
15	Lua	0.645%
16	COBOL	0.600%
17	ABAP	0.587%
18	Lisp/Scheme	0.585%
19	Transact-SQL	0.549%
20	Ada	0.537%

A couple of things struck me about this list of languages. One is the absence of FORTRAN despite the continued presence of COBOL and SQL, both more venerable. This month, FORTRAN is found down at #21, or just pushed out of the top 20. The presence of D in the ranking at 13 (D is the 13th letter for the numerologists in the audience) is amusing at least partly because Walter Bright, D's creator, is a friend of a friend. I am sad to see that Java continues to dominate, but heartened to notice that the C/C++ family if counted as one language would both push Java down a notch, and allow FORTRAN to return to the top 20.

The real surprise is Lua. A year ago, TIOBE had hardly heard of the language. Last December, Lua just slipped on to the top 50 list, at a position quite near to Objective-C (near and dear to Mac OSX developers--interestingly, Objective-C hasn't budged much at all since December, since it is sitting at #50 exactly today). Lua crossed into the top 20 list by landing at 18 in July, and clearly it is on track to improve its current standing again for September.

The full story on what the TIOBE index is calculated from is found here. In short, they run hand tuned queries against all the major search engines for each language, count the significant hits, and do a lot of statistics to arrive at the score for each language. The final ranking is then simply the list of languages sorted by their scores.

In case my biases aren't clear, Lua is my new favorite language especially when combined with just enough C to get the job done. The majority of my productive work is done in C, Lua, and Perl, with the occasional diversion to C++ and on rare occasions, Java. Although I have not personally used any of the .NET family, I firmly believe that .NET is to be preferred to Java any day.