Objective-C passes C++ on the TIOBE Index

Objective-C's steady rise is shown clearly on TIOBE's trend chart
Source: TIOBE Boosted by the interest in mobile phone development, Objective-C has now passed C++ in popularity, at least according to the latest TIOBE Community Index for July 2012. The index uses estimates of numbers of engineers, courses and vendors, along with popular search engine queries, to form an impression of what is the most popular language. TIOBE's methodology may be controversial, but it does provide an indication of trends within the programming community.

At the top of the chart for July 2012, C has held on to top spot with 18%, up 1% year on year, while Java at 16% has lost 3% over the past year. Objective-C though has leapt to third place in the chart with 9.3%, up 4.15% from the same time last year, bumping C++ (9.1%) and C# (6.6%) into fourth and fifth place; at the start of 2009, Objective-C was registering below 1%, while in 2011 it registered the biggest rise in popularity, winning TIOBE's "Language of the Year".

Objective-C is used mainly for the development of applications for Apple's Mac OS X and iOS, and it is believed that the growth in the language's popularity is tied to the explosive growth in mobile application development for iPhone and iPad. C++ remains heavily used in large high performance systems, say the index authors.

Other changes in the chart included the biggest rise in chart positions over the last year for Visual Basic .NET, moving from 25th to 15th, and the biggest fall for Lua, dropping from 11th to 18th.

(djwm)