TIOBE: PHP is coming back

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Summary

The TIOBE Programming Community Index for July 2013 reveals a notable resurgence for PHP, which has climbed to fifth place with a 2.17% increase in popularity compared to the previous year. While C, Java, Objective-C, and C++ maintained their positions in the top four, PHP's comeback is speculatively linked to the September 2012 release of the new PHP Zend Framework, though this explanation is not definitively confirmed. The TIOBE index tracks programming language trends by analyzing data from experienced programmers, courses, and third-party vendors across major search engines and platforms like Wikipedia and YouTube. This monthly updated list serves as an indicator of language popularity rather than an assessment of quality.

TIOBE released the programming language index for July 2013. The highlight of this month is that PHP is coming back. It ranks the fifth and has an increase of 1.54% compared to January. There are no changes in the ranking for the top 4 languages. The reason why PHP is back may be attributed to the new PHP Zend Framework that was released in September 2012, but this reason is not very convincing.

Position
Jul 2013		Position
Jul 2012		Delta in PositionProgramming LanguageRatings
Jul 2013		Delta 
Jul 2012		Status
1 1 C 17.628% -0.70%   A
2 2 Java 15.906% -0.18%   A
3 3 Objective-C 10.248% +0.91%   A
4 4 C++ 8.749% -0.37%   A
5 7 PHP 7.186% +2.17%   A
6 5 C# 6.212% -0.46%   A
7 6 (Visual) Basic 4.336% -1.36%   A
8 8 Python 4.035% +0.03%   A
9 9 Perl 2.148% +0.10%   A
10 11 JavaScript 1.844% +0.39%   A
11 10 Ruby 1.582% -0.19%   A
12 14 Transact-SQL 1.568% +0.61%   A
13 15 Visual Basic .NET 1.254% +0.34%   A
14 19 PL/SQL 0.920% +0.28%   A-
15 13 Lisp 0.868% -0.13%   A
16 16 Pascal 0.792% -0.04%   A
17 12 Delphi/Object Pascal 0.691% -0.47%   B
18 20 MATLAB 0.680% +0.04%   B
19 23 Bash 0.622% +0.04%   A-
20 25 Assembly 0.581% +0.03%   B

For other languages:

PositionProgramming LanguageRatings
21 Ada 0.573%
22 SAS 0.562%
23 Lua 0.529%
24 R 0.515%
25 ABAP 0.457%
26 COBOL 0.441%
27 Fortran 0.414%
28 Scheme 0.378%
29 D 0.364%
30 Erlang 0.349%
31 Haskell 0.330%
32 Logo 0.327%
33 Scala 0.326%
34 Prolog 0.316%
35 Scratch 0.295%
36 Tcl 0.245%
37 F# 0.238%
38 NXT-G 0.232%
39 Smalltalk 0.228%
40 APL 0.226%
41 C shell 0.223%
42 Go 0.222%
43 Forth 0.214%
44 ML 0.212%
45 ActionScript 0.204%
46 Common Lisp 0.202%
47 PL/I 0.200%
48 Ladder Logic 0.185%
49 Groovy 0.183%
50 RPG (OS/400) 0.158%

TIOBE Programming Community Index is an indicator of the programming language trends. It is updated monthly, this list is based on the number of experienced programmers,courses and third-party vendors on the Internet. It uses the well-known search engines (such as Google, MSN, Yahoo) as well as Wikipedia and YouTube to calculate the ranking. Please note that this list is merely a reflection of the popularity of a programming language, does not indicate whether a programming language is good or not.

For the complete ranking analysis, please refer : TIOBE Programming Community Index for July 2013

PHP TIOBE ZEND FRAMEWORK JULY

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  COMMENTS

7
diegoholiveira
Jul 9, 2013 at 11:48 am
Reply

I don't agree that the reason to php is coming back can be the release of the new zend framework version. php is much bigger than only one framework.

Daniel M
Jul 10, 2013 at 11:58 am
Reply

Assembly Assembly ! GO PHP !

fen
Jul 10, 2013 at 1:08 pm
Reply

Well I totally agree with diegoholiveira - Zend Framework seems like a lame explanation for boosting of PHP. I think its position went up due to the fact of releasing new versions (one can see PHP is being developed) and the release of such pearls as Laravel. It's also still (IMHO) the most flexible and powerful language for complex web apps, while maintaining simplicity, at the same time. Back to new versions of PHP - developers see that their requests are taken seriously and introduced in new releases of the language (namespaces, opcode cacheing, traits and so on).

Leric
Jul 10, 2013 at 9:33 pm
Reply

ZF2 is not such a shiny thing to boost PHP usage, I believe PHP 5.4 and 5.5 release and composer should have the credit.

Maby the editor doesn't know much about php, and zend is so famous ...

P.S.  This email validation is too silly, a dot is allowed in username part of email address.

Blash adow
Jul 11, 2013 at 2:32 am
Reply

php it's comming back because good's feature of php 5.3 5.4 and 5.5 and a lot of good frameworks that are taking advantages of theses good features. (Laravel)

blog.mindplay.dk
Jul 14, 2013 at 9:38 am
Reply

Here is one possible explanation.

Consider the fact that PHP is the dominant server-side language, and it is the only language that is used (practically) exclusively for server-side development and nothing else.

If you look at the graph, the popularity drop of PHP is more or less analogous to the popularity increase of Objective-C, which looks like it may be nearing it's peak.

Consider the fact that Objective-C is the dominant language for apps, and that it is a language which is dominantly used for apps.

So one possible explanation might simply be a partial shift in market focus from web sites to apps, with the introduction of new phone/tablet app markets. Now that the app market is starting to stabilize (or perhaps even saturate) and with mobile/responsive sites being the new "big thing", the market focus may be gradually returning to web-sites.

Certainly the release of PHP 5.3 may have also contributed to the increase in popularity - for a lot of developers, the 5.3 release made PHP "bearable" again and gave it another lease of life. While I do agree that 5.4 and 5.5 releases will make PHP perhaps more than bearable, I think it's too soon to attribute an increase in popularity to these releases, as they are not yet widely distributed on mainstream hosting platforms - 5.4 is still emerging, and 5.5 won't reach the mainstream probably for another couple of years, as the mainstream hosting companies are notoriously slow to adopt...

Josh
Jul 15, 2013 at 9:16 am
Reply

One explanation for it edging out Microsoft might be just how crappy Visual Studio 2012 is?

I mean it might be a little late in the game for that, but I can see where the development community might be a year or so behind trends since we are all not very eager to change our main language unless we just have to. Perhaps some of the .NET folks said to "hell with this?"