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.