The top 10 programming languages [The Data]
Ritchie King · IEEE Spectrum · 2011
Listing programming languages is easy-Wikipedia's page has more than 600 entries-but ranking them by popularity is hard. As David Welton, curator of the site LangPop.com, points out, you can't send out a horde of researchers to look over programmers' shoulders and note what languages they're coding in. So you have to get at it indirectly.