As PHP Magazine notes today, PHP has come in fifth (again) on the TIOBE Programming Community index.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.

The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TPC index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

Those higher on the list are Java, C, Visual Basic, and C++, though C++ seems to be fading and Visual Basic growing by leaps and bounds. In the long term trends they record, PHP is showing a rising trend, quite a bit up from even just February of this year.