TIOBE Programming Community Index for March 2012

March Headline: JavaScript surpasses Perl and Python

JavaScript is now at position 8 in the TIOBE index. Since websites depend more and more on JavaScript, it is expected that JavaScript's popularity will rise further in the near future. Another interesting observation is that while big software-related companies such as Oracle, Microsoft and Apple all have one of their programming languages in the top 10, Google seems to be incapable to achieve the same. Google's Go language dropped out of the top 50 this month, while the other major Google language Dart is also not successful yet. It is at position 78.
The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be 

Position Mar 2012	Position Mar 2011	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings Mar 2012	Delta Mar 2011	Status
1	1		Java	17.110%	-2.60%	A
2	2		C	17.087%	+1.82%	A
3	4		C#	8.244%	+1.03%	A
4	3		C++	8.047%	-0.71%	A
5	8		Objective-C	7.737%	+4.22%	A
6	5		PHP	5.555%	-1.01%	A
7	7		(Visual) Basic	4.369%	-0.34%	A
8	10		JavaScript	3.386%	+1.52%	A
9	6		Python	3.291%	-2.45%	A
10	9		Perl	2.703%	+0.73%	A
11	13		Delphi/Object Pascal	1.727%	+0.73%	A
12	30		PL/SQL	1.418%	+1.01%	A
13	11		Ruby	1.413%	-0.09%	A
14	23		Transact-SQL	0.925%	+0.38%	A
15	15		Lisp	0.922%	-0.01%	A
16	22		Visual Basic .NET	0.784%	+0.22%	A-
17	18		Pascal	0.771%	+0.07%	A
18	32		Logo	0.717%	+0.31%	A--
19	17		Ada	0.633%	-0.09%	B
20	19		NXT-G	0.604%	-0.04%	B

Position	Programming Language	Ratings
21	Lua	0.525%
22	R	0.502%
23	Fortran	0.495%
24	MATLAB	0.456%
25	Scheme	0.448%
26	Assembly	0.428%
27	Prolog	0.426%
28	RPG (OS/400)	0.424%
29	SAS	0.412%
30	cg	0.410%
31	Groovy	0.359%
32	COBOL	0.358%
33	ActionScript	0.352%
34	Erlang	0.339%
35	D	0.334%
36	Scratch	0.328%
37	ABAP	0.319%
38	F#	0.302%
39	C shell	0.293%
40	Haskell	0.288%
41	Awk	0.278%
42	Smalltalk	0.269%
43	CFML	0.265%
44	APL	0.260%
45	ML	0.257%
46	Forth	0.254%
47	Eiffel	0.251%
48	Bash	0.227%
49	Tcl	0.226%
50	PL/I	0.224%