ava is number one again after it lost the top position to C 10 months ago. Boosted by the success of Android phones, Java has gained most market share of all languages last half a year (+2.03%). Python is also rising again (+1.07% last half a year). It is rivaling PHP to become the most popular interpreted language.
The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.