Programming Language Popularity

April 21, 2009 in programming | 10 comments

Despite the numerous ways in existence to quantify programming language popularity, I thought I’d throw yet another one into the mix. I made a number of Google searches of the forms below and averaged the results:

"implemented in <language>"
"written in <language>"

I’m very curious to see how these stats change over time, so I’ve added a calendar item to recompute them in six months. Leave a comment if you’d like to add a programming language to the list, and I’ll update this article and it will be included in the recomputation six months from now.

Language # Results
C 1,905,500
Java 850,000
C++ 699,000
PHP 680,000
Python 396,000
Perl 365,500
C# 349,700
Lisp Family1 176,507
JavaScript 102,700
Ruby 99,650
Scheme 86,450
Lisp 61,900
Tcl 44,800
ML Family2 29,062
Haskell 22,550
Erlang 22,285
OCaml 22,000
Common Lisp 20,600
Prolog 17,750
Lua 13,065
Smalltalk 9,105
Arc 6,775
Forth 6,465
(S)ML3 5,173
Scala 3,570
Caml 1,889
Io 1,760
Clojure 782

1 combines Lisp, Scheme, Common Lisp, Arc & Clojure
2 combines OCaml, (S)ML, Caml
3 summed separate searches for sml and ml
Update 4/23/09 added C#, Tcl per comment requests.

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  1. crimson13’s avatar

    crimson13 on April 23, 2009 at 9:31 am

    “implemented in C#” 90.500
    “written in C#” 615.000

  2. anonymous’s avatar

    anonymous on April 23, 2009 at 9:52 am

    Please include tcl,

    may be between Lisp and ML

  3. Brian Adkins’s avatar

    Brian Adkins on April 23, 2009 at 10:00 am

    @crimson13, @anonymous – thanks for the requests. I added both. I find it interesting that I didn’t include C# initially since I programmed in it for 2 or 3 years. I suppose I’ve suppressed all things M$ :)

  4. smallpond’s avatar

    smallpond on April 23, 2009 at 1:53 pm

    pascal = 9230, 65,900
    delphi = 114,000, 3030

  5. Cesar Rabak’s avatar

    Cesar Rabak on April 23, 2009 at 8:22 pm

    implemented in COBOL: 392.000
    written in COBOL: 1.170.000

  6. Cesar Rabak’s avatar

    Cesar Rabak on April 23, 2009 at 8:24 pm

    implemented in Fortran: 1.290.000
    written in Fortran: 2.410.000

  7. Brian Adkins’s avatar

    Brian Adkins on April 23, 2009 at 8:47 pm

    @Cesar you need to search in quotes. For example, when I search for “written in cobol”, I get 39,900 instead of 1M+