Microsoft’s C gets an A

IT World Canada Staff

11 years ago

Microsoft Corp.’s multi-purpose programming language C# has been named language of the year for 2012 by the PopularitY of Programming Language (PYPL) index for having the biggest growth in usage last year.

The PYPL’s findings differ from results earlier released by the TIOBE Programming Community Index which said Objective-C was 2012’s most popular programming language.

TIOBE ranks languages by counting the number of Web pages with the language name. By its account, Objective-C has over 28 million pages while C# has 11 million pages. On the other hand, the PYPL index analyzes how often language tutorials are searched on Google, the rationale being that the more tutorials for a programming language is searched the more popular that language is.

Although Java remains the most widely used programming language globally, C#’s growth in popularity hit 2.3 per cent in 2012 eclipsing the growth of other programming languages for the same period. Java had a 28.3 per cent developer share but its usage went down 0.3 per cent, according to PYPL.

Why is it important to know what is the most popular programming language?

Popularity indexes can help IT professionals decide which programming language to study or use in a software project.

Here’s a rundown of the top ten programming languages ranked by PYPL:

Read the whole story here