Measuring programming language popularity


It is difficult to determine which programming languages are "most widely used" because the meaning of the term varies by context. One language may occupy the most programmer-hours, another may have the most lines of code, a third may utilize the most CPU time, and so on. Some languages are very popular for particular kinds of applications: for example, COBOL in the corporate data center, often on large mainframes; Fortran in computational science and engineering; C in embedded applications and operating systems; and other languages for many kinds of applications.

Methods

Various counts have been proposed to indicate a language's popularity, each subject to a different bias over what is measured. These counts include the number of:
Several indices have been published: