JavaScript's popularity rankings vary widely

How popular is JavaScript? That depends on how you measure it.

This month's Tiobe Programming Community Index, which measures language popularity, has JavaScript ranked in only the 11th spot, showing up in just 1.37 percent of Internet searches gauged by the index. On the popular GitHub code-sharing site, however, JavaScript is the most popular language, accounting for 21 percent of code hosted on the site. This month's PYPL Popularity of Programming Language index has JavaScript ranked seventh, with a 7.3 percent share. 

At Tiobe, Managing Director Paul Jansen was dismissive of GitHub's JavaScript numbers. "People should be aware that GitHub is an open source software archive, thus containing lots of toy projects that can't be taken seriously," Jansen said. "I couldn't find the average GitHub project size that quickly, but I bet that 50 percent of the projects will have less than 10,000 lines of code."

Tiobe bases its index on the number of skilled engineers worldwide, as well as courses and third-party vendors pertaining to or interested in a particular language. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo along with sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. PYPL measures language popularity by analyzing how often language tutorials are searched on Google.

In this month's Tiobe index, Ruby joins PHP and Python as interpreted programming languages outpacing Perl. Perl still shows up as the 10th most popular language, while Ruby ranked ninth and Python was slotted at eighth. "Is Perl on its way out of the top 10? Time will tell," Tiobe said.

Java remained in the top spot this month, showing up in 18.156 percent of searches, while C was second with 17.141 percent. The remainder of the top 10 features Objective-C (10.23 percent) ranking third, followed by C++ (9.115 percent), C# (6.597 percent), PHP (4.809 percent), and Visual Basic (4.607 percent). Python's ranking was 4.388 percent, with Ruby tallying 2.15 percent and Perl 1.959 percent.

Like Tiobe's index, PYPL ranked Java No. 1 with a 27.1 percent share. It was followed by PHP (14.4 percent), Python (9.6 percent), C# (9.5 percent), C++ (9.4 percent), and C (8.3 percent). Coming in eighth was Objective-C (6.1 percent), followed by Visual Basic (3.6 percent) and Ruby (2.7 percent.)