Tiobe Software issues a monthly “programming community index” that rates the most popular programming languages “based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors” (no doubt a better criteria than just looking at Google Trends). In the June numbers, Java remains on top, ahead of C and C++, with PHP and Python on the rise and C# and Visual Basic on the decline. The PHP impact blog trumpets the numbers and, as an aside, notes that PHP and Java have similar syntaxes, which makes it easy for developers to work in both languages. JavaPHP