Friday, June 01, 2012

PL/SQL Popularity

TIOBE tracks the "popularity" of programming languages.

To quote from their index page: "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."

It has been very gratifying to see that PL/SQL is doing much better than holding its own. It has moved up dramatically in the past year. Go, PL/SQL, go!

1 comment:

iudith said...

Hello Steven,

This statistics in interesting :)
I'd like to hope that one day our
PL/SQL will hit the "double figures", to use a basketball term :)

What is also interesting is that the old and frightening C still sits on the first place, higher than its better relative C++ ...

And what is interesting not less in that the old COBOL of my youth
still arrives on a honourable higher rank than the so praised ABAP ...
About 25 years ago I was told that COBOL was in use (at that time!) only in the 3-rd world countries ... and nowadays I hear every day that SAP and its ABAP are the best programming language ever created ...

I think that the high ranking of C
owes much to tradition ...
Well, Oracle is written in C, but can one imagine Oracle's today extension without the SQL and PL/SQL languages created over that C foundation ?

As time passes, there will still be many languages created, in an attempt to either create the ultimative "best of all" one or
simply for solving some very special category of problems.

I really don't know what could be an objective set of criteria to establish a real ranking, based on technology only and not business-related points of view.

Anyway, I think that if I had to write in C instead of PL/SQL, I would probably not have been a
developer today ...

Best Regards,
Iudith Mentzel