Dr. Dobbs has an interesting interview with Paul Jansen, the managing director of TIOBE Software, about the Programming Community Index, which measures the popularity of programming languages by monitoring their web presence.

Since the TIOBE index has been published now for more than 6 years, it gives an interesting picture about trends in the usage of programming languages. Jansen says not much has affected the top ten programming languages in the last five years, with only Python entering the top 10 (replacing COBOL), but C and C are definitely losing ground.

‘Languages without automated garbage collection are getting out of fashion,’ says Jansen. ‘The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection.’