SAN FRANCISCO — Thanks to the popularity of Apple’s iPad and iPhone mobile devices, the Objective-C language has overtaken C++ in Tiobe Software’s monthly assessment of programming language popularity.
Objective-C, the language used for developing applications to run on Apple’s mobile devices, was ranked the third most-popular language in the July edition of the Tiobe Programming Community Index, followed by C++ in fourth place. Released this week, the index has Objective-C used by 9.335 percent of developers and C++ used by 9.118 percent. The two languages swap rankings from last month, when C++ was used by 9.358 percent of developers and Objective-C by 9.094 percent.
[ The rankings of Tiobe, which evaluates software code, recently came under fire from PHP advocate Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend Technologies, who questioned their accuracy. ]
Tiobe’s ratings are based on number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors leveraging a particular language, with rankings determined by assessments of popular search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Analyses of other sites, such as Wikipedia, Amazon, and YouTube, also are factored into the assessment.
