Index Ratings for Popular Programming Languages from TIOBE
TIOBE Index Rating (more formally, TIOBE Programming Community Index) is an indicator for measurement of the programming languages' popularity. It gets updated once every month (although the dates are not regular).
The ratings are based on the number of talented engineers world-wide, courses and 3rd party vendors. To calculate the ratings, 25 search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu) are also used. In order to qualify a language, it must have its own Wikipedia entry; the explanations must be stated clearly for being a programming language. Furthermore, it should be "Turing complete" and have at least 5000 hits for "language programming" for Google.
According to the authorities, this index is NOT an indication for the best programming language. Rather, it is a helpful measurement to choose the language strategically for software development.
All the datasets presented here are taken from this web site. Click the link for more information: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
There are two main types of datasets available:
FIRST TYPE contains all the ratings for popular programming languages, starting from June 2001. Surely, new lines are inserted when a new index rating is published monthly. New languages might be added later as inidividual columns once they've made to the top 20.
SECOND TYPE shows the ratings for top 20 programming languages that were presented to the monthly index list, starting from September 2020 up to the latest month individually. Naturally, new ones will exist as separate datasets in monthly basis. After some time, the lists from the previous years are grouped together in their belonging directories.
All rating values are carefully fetched by examining the graphical plots of all aforementioned programming languages.
Furthermore, there exist sub-types in this repo: Very Long Term History which contains the rankings of popular programming languages according to the index as 5-year intervals (from current year down to 1988) and Programming Language of the Year that represents the list of programming languages entered the hall of fame by having the highest rise in ratings every year, since 2003.
Currently, there are two analyeses available: January 2023 & November 2020.
Click on the corresponding notebook file (.ipynb) above to inspect and see how the ratings for many programming languages have been changed in time:
Tiobe_Index_Ratings_(Jan2023).ipynb or Tiobe_Index_Ratings_(Nov2020).ipynb.
In this repo, these programming languages (total of 31) are being tracked monthly (starting from September 2020):
CJavaPythonC++C#Visual BasicJavaScriptPHPRSQLGoSwiftPerlAssembly LanguageRubyMATLABGroovyRustObjective-CDartClassic Visual Basic(since October 2020)PL/SQL(since October 2020)Delphi/Object Pascal(since November 2020)Transact-SQL(since November 2020)Fortran(since April 2021)Prolog(since August 2021)Lua(since March 2022)Scratch(since October 2022)COBOL(since July 2023)Julia(since August 2023)Kotlin(since September 2023)
Programming language Python has won the title "TIOBE's programming language of the year 2024". This award is given to the programming language with the highest incrase in ratings in one year time. Python gained a whopping 9.3% in 2024. This is far ahead of its competition: Java +2.3%, JavaScript +1.4% and Go +1.2%. Python is everywhere nowadays, and it is the undisputed default language of choice in many fields. It might even become the language with the highest ranking ever in the TIOBE Index. Python's only serious drawbacks are (and thus leaving room for competition) its lack of performance and that most errors occur in-time.
Apart from this, two interesting things happened in the TIOBE Index top 10 in 2024. The C language lost a lot of popularity and was surpassed by C++ and Java. The main reason for this is that C is replaced by C++ in a lot of embedded software systems. Java and C++ are currently fighting for the top 2 position. The other interesting thing is that PHP said a final farewell to the top 10 and is replaced by Go, which is a top 10 keeper.
Lots of eyes were on Rust and Kotlin this year. Did they live up to their promises in 2024? Rust is still getting more popular. Despite the amazing speed of Rust programs, its steep learning curve will never make it become the lingua franca of the common programmer unfortunately. Kotlin, on the other hand, disappointed: it didn't break through and even lost (possibly permanent) its top 20 position in 2024.
Further down the list we see two new promising languages: Rust's competitor Zig climbed from #149 to #61 in 2024, whereas Mojo, the faster Python, jumped from position #194 to #68. Especially Mojo, which was first released only 2 years ago, addresses exactly what is needed in the programming field. I have high hopes that it will get close to a top 20 position in 2025. (Paul Jensen - Chief Executive Officer)