Looking over the ten-year chart, several patterns emerge immediately. The steady decline of Java is real. Ten years ago, it made up nearly 27% of mentions; since then, it’s dropped to 18%. What is less clear is the state of JVM languages as a whole. But we can make a good guess that even if the main JVM languages were added back in to Java’s numbers, the total would still see a decline. Like most readers, I would expect this to be the case, and I expect most of the emigrants migrated to Ruby and Python. We’ll see in a moment if this theory is supported.
Java’s decline, however, has not knocked it from the top position. It now enjoys a thin lead over C, followed (after a substantial gap) by C++ and PHP. These last two languages have been exchanging positions for a long time. While they’ve both declined somewhat during the last year, it’s too early to tell whether or not that’s a trend.
(Full Story: The Rise And Fall of Languages in 2010)