Programming languages come and go, but its nice to see what’s gaining momentum and what’s not. In the latest Tiobe report for January 2012 we can see some interesting surprises in the top 20 chart of programming languages. C is still highly demanded and closing on Java. Both account for 1/3 of the programming languages panorama.

Other interesting aspect is the fading of Python. Python lost half of it’s market share. Maybe this is because of Python 3 and the incompatibilities with Python 2.x that might have sent many programmers in search other solutions. Another problem might be GIL that hinders thread programming in Python in a time when programming is moving to the concurrent and distributed programming.

Also interesting is the rise of R. R is one of my favorite languages for science. It makes reproducibility of research results very easy (specially if you use Sweave with R) and for any kind of statistical analysis it is almost perfect. It also produces great plots for scientific publications.