The October edition of the Programming Community Index, released Sunday, October 9, found that Java lost popularity in September, with an estimated 17.913 percent of developers using it as opposed to 18.761 percent in the previous month's index. Java still finished as the top language, but if the downward trend continues, the C language, ranked second with 17.707 percent of users, will be number one next month, Tiobe said.

Java has been tops in the index from 2001 until now with a few exceptions between mid-2004 and mid- 2005 and couple of months last year, when C took over, said Paul Jansen, managing director at Tiobe. He anticipates Java facing a long-term downward trend based on what he sees happening in the field. "This downward trend is probably caused by the fact that the Java language evolves too slowly compared to other languages, such as C#," Jansen said.

In July, Oracle the first major update in more than five years. The release features accommodations for multi-core processors and dynamic languages. Java SE 8 is due in 2013, featuring the planned JavaScript engine.

Rounding out the top 10 languages in Tiobe's index were C++, PHP, C#, Objective-C, Visual Basic, Python, Perl, and JavaScript. Objective-C and Transact-SQL scored all-time highs, with usage rates of 6.245 percent and .909 percent respectively, while Assembly re-entered the top 20 by claiming the 19th spot. Visual Basic.Net jumped to the 25th spot after ranking 39th last month, while F# dropped from 23rd to 46th.