My first programming language was Basic. When I began using C in the late eighties-- I believe, I found the most important language that I would need. I have used others since learning C-- however, I consider C to be the most important.

The internet has made it so easy to gather usage statistics for almost anything. One of my favorite tools is Google Trends. That said- ambiguity often makes it difficult to get a good read-- especially when trying to gather stats for today's programming languages, i.e., Java, Ruby on Rails.

So when I happened on tiobe.com which maintains popularity stats for programming languages-- I was quite pleased and thought I would share-- see this page.

Partial table showing current programming language trends:

Freelancer.com project listings another good resource for statistics on software development languages and usage.