During tough economic times it is important to be always thinking about your next career move. If you got laid off today would you be able to find another job using your current skill set? As an IT professional I am constantly working on keeping my skills relevant and current. In particular, developers need to learn programming languages that can keep them gainfully employed for years to come. So if you are considering learning a new programming language how do you know which one to pick? One possible way would be to take a look at the TIOBE Programming Community Index:

"The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written."

"The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system."

Although TIOBE's method used to collect statistics is not perfect, it still serves as a good indicator of which programming languages are still actively developed with. The top 5 for January 2009 are Java, C, C++, VB and PHP. The chart below shows the long term trends.

While gazing into my crystal ball I came up with my own predictions based on this data:

Java, C++ and C are excellent skills to acquire. They are heavily rooted in the industry and will remain that way for decades to come. Especially due to the fact that most colleges still teach the majority of their programming courses with these languages.

I believe that Java will continue to slowly lose market share. I would like to think that this is partially due to the emergence of .NET as an enterprise scale development platform. However Java will always be a big player in the market due to its ability to run on multiple operating systems. This is something that Microsoft .NET will probably never accomplish.

As a former Delphi programmer I would like to see the language stay on the chart. Unfortunately, I do not think that Borland has positioned the product well over that last five years. They had a couple of really bad software releases starting with Delphi 8 which I believe hurt their reputation. Anyway these are just my personal opinions. If you disagree (which I am sure most people will) then please leave a comment.