TIOBE index

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The TIOBE programming community index is a measure of popularity of programming languages, created and maintained by TIOBE Software BV, based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.^[1] TIOBE stands for The Importance of Being Earnest, the title of an 1895 comedy play by Oscar Wilde, to emphasize the organization's "sincere and professional attitude towards customers, suppliers and colleagues".^[2]

The index is calculated from the number of search engine results for queries containing the name of the language.^[3] The index covers searches in Google, Google Blogs, MSN, Yahoo!, Baidu, Wikipedia and YouTube. The index is updated once a month. The current information is free, but the long-term statistical data is for sale. The index authors have stated that it may be valuable when making various strategic decisions. TIOBE focuses on Turing complete languages, so it does not provide information about the popularity of HTML or other markup languages such as XML.