There was good news this week for anyone looking for
C# jobs, as the Microsoft language's growing popularity with developers put it on course to overtake C++.
The news comes from the release of the Tiobe Programming Community Index, which assesses the popularity of different programming languages. Tiobe ranks languages according to the number of engineers either using or studying for qualifications in them, as well as the numbers of associated third-party vendors. Figures are determined by looking at data from search engines and other major web destinations, such as YouTube or Wikipedia.
C++ was the third most popular language at 8.252%, just ahead of C#, preferred by 8.205% of developers. C++ has ranked third in the index for ten years now, despite occasional challenges from the likes of Perl, Visual Basic, and PHP.
Java topped the chart - the favourite of 17.56% - closely followed by C, at 17.057%.
Interestingly, Tiobe has also found that smaller languages are growing in popularity, especially those that run on the Java Virtual Machine. Groovy entered the index at 45 and Clojure has appeared in the top 100.
However, before those of you in
IT contract jobs rush to brush up on your C#, be aware that this may be no more than a temporary boost for C#. With C++ better suited to the booming area of mobile applications C#'s continued rise is by no means guaranteed
