[dba-Tech] Transact-SQL Named Programming Language of 2013

The TIOBE Index of the most popular programming languages named Transact-SQL
as the programming language of 2013.

According to the TIOBE Index, maintained by TIOBE Software, Transact-SQL was
the biggest mover of 2013. Last year, Transact-SQL won almost 1 percent of
popularity (0.98 percent to be precise), followed by Objective-C at 0.81
percent and F# at 0.53 percent.

"It is a bit strange that Transact-SQL wins the award because its major
application field, Microsoft's database engine SQL Server, is losing
popularity," TIOBE officials said. The general conclusion is that
Transact-SQL won because actually not much happened in 2013. In former
years, the award winner gained many percentage points in a year.

Transact-SQL (T-SQL) is Microsoft and Sybase's proprietary extension to the
Structured Query Language (SQL). SQL is a standardized computer language
that was originally developed by IBM for querying, altering and defining
relational databases, using declarative statements. T-SQL expands on the SQL
standard to include procedural programming, local variables, various support
functions for string processing, date processing, mathematics, etc., and
changes to the DELETE and UPDATE statements. These additional features make
Transact-SQL Turing complete.

Transact-SQL is central to using Microsoft SQL Server. All applications that
communicate with an instance of SQL Server do so by sending Transact-SQL
statements to the server, regardless of the user interface of the
application.

As the last decade has shown, programming language popularity is largely
influenced by external trends, TIOBE said. The most important ones at the
moment are mobile phone apps and Web development. Android (mainly Java) and
iOS (Objective-C) are the major mobile platforms, while Windows Phone
(mainly C#) is catching up.

Meanwhile, in the Web development world, TIOBE officials said there is not
much happening yet despite all the HTML5 discussions. JavaScript should be
the big winner but has not gained much popularity on the list as it holds
stable at around the No. 9 spot. Yet, JavaScript's alternatives are faring
even worse, with Dart ranked at 124, CoffeeScript at 170 and TypeScript at
205.

TIOBE changed the TIOBE index algorithm at the end of 2013. The two major
changes are: 1) Search engines now contribute much more to the TIOBE index
based on their Alexa rankings and suitability to process data automatically,
and 2) in the past the sum of the ratings of the top 50 languages was 100
percent, but now the sum of all languages is 100 percent. As a result, most
top languages dropped by about 0.5 percent.

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 worldwide, courses and third-party
vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia,
Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. TIOBE index is
not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines
of code have been written.