Have you heard of the TIOBE Programming Community Index? It’s a table that lists the ratings of programming languages and tracks their status throughout the developer ecosystem. It’s a good indicator of where a language stands in terms of its general use. April has a few surprises though.

It was found that Java is a downward trend from it’s top spot in the developer world. It would appear that C is now the most popular programming language in the world at a rating of 17.555 percent. It’s not all that bad for Java though since it’s rating for April is at 17.026 percent. TIOBE Software says that Java will never diminish too badly due to the Android development scene.

How does TIOBE find these results? Here’s how the Web site puts it:

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.

What’s interesting is that C-based languages make up the majority of the top five list with C++ coming in at number three with a rating of 8.896 percent, Objective-C at number four with 8.236 percent and C# at number 5 with 7.348 percent. Objective-C has seen the largest climb with its position at number eight this time last year.

While Java may be doing down, JavaScript is working it’s way up rather slowly. It was at number 10 this time last year, but now it’s at number nine.

TIOBE hopes that their list will help developers make the proper choice when it comes to building new applications. Choosing a more popular language will ensure maximum compatibility, but there are applications being made now that should make language conversion easier for those who want to program applications in multiple languages.

Here’s the top 20 languages for the month of April according to the TIOBE Index:

[h/t: Slashdot]