PHP as been bumped down a spot in the popularity ranking provided by Tiobe Software for this month. It was pushed down to fifth place by Visual Basic moving up the ranks. The others in the top five are (in order) Java, C, C++, and Visual Basic.

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 TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

According to their long term trends graph, PHP has still been gaining popularity overall, with only a bit of a dip lately. Other languages in the top five are also currently seeing similar dips in popularity too. Check out the full report for all of this month's details.