News

PowerShell Usage Increases in Microsoft's Era of Openness

• By David Ramel
• March 5, 2019

One byproduct of Microsoft's embrace of openness and interoperability may be a boost in popularity for PowerShell, the company's venerable scripting language.

That's the conclusion of the TIOBE index, which found little of consequence to note in its monthly gauge of programming language popularity beyond the fact that PowerShell reappeared among the top 50 in the new March report.

Except for that, it was pretty much business as usual, with the top 10 languages in March 2019 being mostly the same as March 2018, with a few changing positions.

TIOBE speculated on the one tidbit of news it could find in the new rankings.

"There are hardly any interesting changes in the TIOBE index this month," the report said. "We had to use our magnifying glass to spot some news, i.e. that PowerShell entered the TIOBE index top 50."

It actually came in at No. 45, between Hack and Awk, on the strength of a 0.180 percent increase in the popularity gauge from last year.

"The PowerShell scripting language is more than 12 years old and it has been in the top 50 before," the report said. "PowerShell is typically used for basic scripting. Until recently it was only available for Windows but Microsoft used its .NET Core platform to create PowerShell Core. This version is open source and runs on all major platforms. This might be the reason why PowerShell is getting more popular again."

TIOBE bases its index on the number of worldwide skilled engineers, courses and third-party vendors, using popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu. "It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written," the firm says.