If one would measure popularity by number of hits on Google, these are the five most popular computer languages:

1. PHP
2. Java
3. C
4. Flash
5. Perl

A graph of Google hits, using the query +lang +programming, for some of the most common languages follows. NOTE 1: please inform me if your favorite language is omitted. NOTE 2: I did not include the language D since it is a too common letter in those weird latin languages. NOTE 3: I added -c++ when looking for C hits.

We see that the three giants are PHP, Java and C, which together stand for half of the hits. In fact, the new languages C# and Ruby are dwarfed by Perl. So much for those cool new languages Another interesting aspect is that Cobol is still searched for more than the functional programming languages Haskell, Eiffel and O’Caml. So, is even the recent functional programming buzz just a media buzz? People are really much more interested in the latest Cobol modifications?

Since we all know that AJAX is the new hot buzz word – along with Ruby on Rails and Web2.0 – we could use a One Degree to AJAX principle to measure the hotness of a language. This is done by simply dividing the number of hits where we add +ajax to the number of total hits. That will provide a decent hotness ratio. Let us see what we get with this “hotness by semi-correlation with AJAX” measure.

So the hottest languages are then:

1. haXe
2. Ruby
3. Flash
4. JavaScript
5. F#

That JavaScript joined these ranks is not exactly a surprise, since AJAX is implemented on the client side – directly or indirectly – using JavaScript What is a surprise is that it has three languages in front of it!

At the bottom of this list we then find quite cold languages, like Ada and Fortran. Dying beasts.

What might surprise an upcoming crowd of crazy Erlang aficionados, such as this blogger, is that Erlang is even colder than Pascal. Another surprise is that Assembler scores relatively well. Cool, I always wanted to see some AJAX RPC mechanisms implemented in assembler.

So, it is now official: haXe is the hottest programming language! For more about this language, go to the source.