Interested in learning a new language? Or just curious about current hot technologies? Darien Graham-Smith explores the language leaderboard.

Back in 2006, Clive Humby – a British mathematician and most famous of data scientists – said B that data is the new oil. But if it weren’t for code, that data would still be stuck in the metaphorical ground, which many might argue would be better for the world in both analogy and reality forms, but we digress… If data is the new oil, we’re not sure exactly what that makes code – perhaps the entire petrochemical infrastructure – but it shows how valuable good (and probably mediocre and awful) code has become.

With our ongoing exploration of classic coding languages that helped bring computing to the modern age (see page 62 for our focus on FOCAL this month), we thought we should take a whirlwind look at what the TIOBE index (http://tiobe.com/ tiobe-index) says are the top languages shaping the coding world today. And ask: is it a good metric? Well, that’s debatable; the TIOBE index is based on search engine results. This explains why Python appears at number one (while StackOverflow ranks it fourth) versus JavaScript being down in seventh place (StackOverflow ranks this first) and SQL coming in at number eight (StackOverflow ranks this second).

We could spend a whole article debating methodology, but really there shouldn’t be many surprises here – the classics are all represented and with the world being so internet-orientated, the code that lubricates that infernal machine heads up much of the rest of the table…

1 Python

The TIOBE index makes Python the most popular programming language in the world – or at least, the one people want to know about more than any other. A major part of its appeal is that Python uses a small vocabulary of simple instructions, mostly with plain English names, so it’s very easy for a beginner to jump in and start writing working programs. Python is relaxed about variables; you can work with numbers and strings without having to explicitly define your data types, and you don’t need to worry about memory usage, as the interpreter automatically de-allocates variables and program structures that are no longer needed (known as garbage collection).

While it’s easy to get started in Python, you can use it to create almost any kind of program, from a simple string-processing tool to a fast-action arcade game. Hundreds of free libraries provide functions that you can drop into your programs to add capabilities from website publishing to image editing, data analysis and machine learning.