Google’s Go Wins Programming Language Of The Year Award
Google’s open source programming language Go has won the “TIOBE’s Programming Language of the Year 2009”
award. This award is given to the programming language that gained
the most market share in 2009. Go enjoyed an increase of 1.25%
since it was officially announced in November 2009.
Go is a compiled programming language that has native support for
concurrent programming, in addition to support for networked and
multicore computing. It also features automatic garbage collection,
where a ‘collector’ attempts to reclaim any memory occupied by
objects no longer used by the program. Other languages that saw an
increase in 2009 were PHP, which gained a 1.19% market share, and Apple’s
Objective-C. Objective-C increased its market
share by 1.24% and rose from 37th most popular programming language
in January 2009, to 12th most popular in January 2010. In his
January Newsflash, Paul Jansen speculated this
was due to “the popularity of iPhone application
development.”
Coding standards company TIOBE made its predictions for 2010, claiming that C++
and C# would see an increase, whereas TIOBE predicted Java, Perl
and Objective-C would “have a hard time.”
In addition to the Programming Language of the Year award, TIOBE
produces the monthly Programming Community index. The index counts
the hits on popular search engines Google, MSN, Wikipedia, Yahoo!
and YouTube, to give an indication of the current popularity of
programming languages. Go made its chart debut at number 13 in
January 2010, while Java retained the top spot,
although TIOBE reports Java is actually in decline.