Twilp
TWILP - May 2010
This is the Twitter Language Popularity index for midnight, May 1st 2010. This list is based on the number of tweets a programming language gets mentioned in, multiplied by the number of followers the author has.
Remarkably, the top 6 has remained stable since the beginning of this year, which means that month after month these languages are being talked about in the same degree. PHP's number 1 position has gone absolutely unchallenged since we launched Twilp last fall, with always about twice as many twilp-point per month as the runner-up, Java.
This month, Perl's popularity in Japan pushed it to the 8th place, in front of C++. Due to natural language limitations, we were unable to figure out why. But we did manage to identify the release of Delphi Prism 2010 (a new generation development tool for .Net and Mono) as the main factor that helped Delphi inch forward in front of MATLAB to position 11.
Further down the list, bigger movements occured. Fortran dropped back to 19 after making a strong re-entry into the list last month at position 14. Objective-C jumped forward two places to position 14 as a result to a surge in tweets regarding iPhone app development. Smalltalk re-entered the list at position 18 after the release of the Pharo development environment.
After six full months of tracking language popularity, we decided to look back to the absolute numbers of twilp-points accumulated each month by the top 5 languages. To our surprise, this number does not show any upward or downward trend, but hovers around the 300 million tweet-followers per month. Apparently, programmer's were early twitter adopters and twitter's currently ongoing growth does not come from the programming language community.
If you care about the live data, you can check Twilp in real-time here: the hourly Twilp chart, the daily average Twilp chart, and the weekly average Twilp chart.
| Rank | Language | Changed since last month | Months on TWILP |
| 1 | PHP (1995 Canada) | 0 | 6 |
| 2 | Java (1995, USA) | 0 | 6 |
| 3 | JavaScript (1995, USA) | 0 | 6 |
| 4 | Ruby (1995, Japan) | 0 | 6 |
| 5 | Python (1989, Netherlands) | 0 | 6 |
| 6 | C# (2002, USA) | 0 | 6 |
| 7 | VisualBasic (1991, USA) | 0 | 6 |
| 8 | Perl (1987, USA) | +1 | 6 |
| 9 | C++ (1983, USA) | -1 | 6 |
| 10 | ActionScript (2000, USA) | 0 | 6 |
| 11 | Delphi (1986, USA) | +1 | 6 |
| 12 | MATLAB (1970, USA) | -1 | 6 |
| 13 | Haskell (1990, USA) | 0 | 5 |
| 14 | Objective-C (1980, USA) | +2 | 6 |
| 15 | COBOL (1959, USA) | 0 | 6 |
| 16 | Erlang (1986, USA) | +2 | 6 |
| 17 | ABAP (1980, Germany) | 0 | 6 |
| 20 | Smalltalk (1970, USA) | - | 1 |
| 19 | Fortran (1957, USA) | -5 | 2 |
| 19 | PL/I (1964, USA) | - | 1 |
SIG will continue to track programming language popularity and create periodic analysis of changes that will occur. If you have any questions on this or other SIG services, please contact Tobias Kuipers at t.kuipers@sig.eu or @tk300.