JavaScript is perhaps the most talked about language these days, though it still continues to score low in the index for programming language popularity. But it is slowly gaining ground and is making its way among the most used programming languages today.

JavaScript is ranked at 10th in the Tiobe index of programming languages. According to Tiobe, it is quite a miracle that JavaScript hasn’t broken into the top 5 programming languages yet. This language is the primary attraction for client side programming of web pages these days. But it is slowly expanding the application domain. JavaScript has been made a server side language by Node.js and the number of browser based games running on this language has been increasing consistently.

The Programming Community Index by Tiobe is developed through an assessment of carious search engines like Yahoo! and Google, apart from online resources such as Wikipedia. Different factors like number of engineers throughout the world, third party vendors, and courses related to a particular language are taken into account in this ranking.

According to the managing director of Tiobe, Mr. Paul Jensen, the low ranking of this language is rather odd. He believes that the reason for the low ranking is that JavaScript never tried to be a standalone language. It is more or less always used in the capacity of an assisting language of a system which is programmed in some other language, for instance, client side JavaScript or server side PHP or Java.

Even then, JavaScript has endured threats like being taken as a language where it is very easy to make mistakes. Dart is a potential successor of JavaScript that comes with a refined language, and is developed by Google. It is currently ranked 80th. Other languages like TypeScript and CoffeeScript have been developed to generate code in JavaScript rather than writing it yourself.

The rival ranking PyPL, or Popularity of Programming Language Index, places JavaScript at 6th position. This ranking gives JavaScript an 8.2% market share right now. Preceding this language in the rankings are Java with 29.6$ market share, C# with 10.4%, Python with 10%, and C++ with a market share of 9.4%.

The Tiobe ranking places C language as the top choice for programmers, with almost 18% of searches in its name on popular search engines. It is followed by Java with 17%, Objective C with 10%, C++ with 9%, PP with 6%, C# with 6%, Visual Basic with 4%, Python with 4%, and Perl with a search percentage of 2%.