August Headline: Data Mining and AI languages are booming in the TIOBE index
mart phones were the new hit many years ago. As a consequence, the programming languages that were used to write mobile applications became very popular as well. The best example of this is Objective-C, which peaked at position 3 in the TIOBE index, whereas it was only used to write apps for iPhones. Nowadays we have the same with data mining and AI. Programming languages in these fields are booming. The most striking example is Python that took over the second position from Java. Even old languages see a revival because of this, like the surge of Fortran. And, even more astonishing, we see Prolog re-entering the top 20 after 15 years... making an unexpected comeback. Prolog is used in IBM's Watson, one of the most well known AI engines. The only exception to all this is R, which is as opposed to the others, losing some positions. I guess Python is eating R's market share. Other interesting moves this month are: Rust from position #27 to #24 and Julia from position #35 to #26. Both Rust and Julia are strong candidates for a permanent top 20 position. -- Paul Jansen CEO TIOBE Software
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. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. 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 index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.
| Aug 2021 | Aug 2020 | Change | Programming Language | Ratings | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  |
C | 12.57% | -4.41% | |
| 2 | 3 |  |
 |
Python | 11.86% | +2.17% |
| 3 | 2 |  |
 |
Java | 10.43% | -4.00% |
| 4 | 4 |  |
C++ | 7.36% | +0.52% | |
| 5 | 5 |  |
C# | 5.14% | +0.46% | |
| 6 | 6 |  |
Visual Basic | 4.67% | +0.01% | |
| 7 | 7 |  |
JavaScript | 2.95% | +0.07% | |
| 8 | 9 | |
 |
PHP | 2.19% | -0.05% |
| 9 | 14 |  |
 |
Assembly language | 2.03% | +0.99% |
| 10 | 10 |  |
SQL | 1.47% | +0.02% | |
| 11 | 18 | |
 |
Groovy | 1.36% | +0.59% |
| 12 | 17 | |
 |
Classic Visual Basic | 1.23% | +0.41% |
| 13 | 42 | |
 |
Fortran | 1.14% | +0.83% |
| 14 | 8 |  |
 |
R | 1.05% | -1.75% |
| 15 | 15 |  |
Ruby | 1.01% | -0.03% | |
| 16 | 12 | |
 |
Swift | 0.98% | -0.44% |
| 17 | 16 | |
 |
MATLAB | 0.98% | +0.11% |
| 18 | 11 | |
 |
Go | 0.90% | -0.52% |
| 19 | 36 | |
 |
Prolog | 0.80% | +0.41% |
| 20 | 13 | |
 |
Perl | 0.78% | -0.33% |
Other programming languages
The complete top 50 of programming languages is listed below. This overview is published unofficially, because it could be the case that we missed a language. If you have the impression there is a programming language lacking, please notify us at tpci@tiobe.com. Please also check the overview of all programming languages that we monitor.
| Position | Programming Language | Ratings |
|---|---|---|
| 21 | SAS | 0.67% |
| 22 | Delphi/Object Pascal | 0.62% |
| 23 | Objective-C | 0.61% |
| 24 | Rust | 0.56% |
| 25 | Scratch | 0.55% |
| 26 | Julia | 0.51% |
| 27 | Ada | 0.49% |
| 28 | Lisp | 0.47% |
| 29 | Dart | 0.45% |
| 30 | PL/SQL | 0.43% |
| 31 | (Visual) FoxPro | 0.42% |
| 32 | Scala | 0.42% |
| 33 | ABAP | 0.41% |
| 34 | COBOL | 0.37% |
| 35 | Logo | 0.31% |
| 36 | F# | 0.30% |
| 37 | Kotlin | 0.30% |
| 38 | Transact-SQL | 0.27% |
| 39 | Lua | 0.26% |
| 40 | Scheme | 0.24% |
| 41 | Ladder Logic | 0.24% |
| 42 | VBScript | 0.23% |
| 43 | D | 0.23% |
| 44 | Clojure | 0.22% |
| 45 | LabVIEW | 0.22% |
| 46 | Nim | 0.22% |
| 47 | VHDL | 0.21% |
| 48 | Apex | 0.21% |
| 49 | TypeScript | 0.21% |
| 50 | Bash | 0.18% |
The Next 50 Programming Languages
The following list of languages denotes #51 to #100. Since the differences are relatively small, the programming languages are only listed (in alphabetical order).
- ActionScript, Alice, Arc, Awk, B4X, bc, BCPL, Bourne shell, CFML, CL (OS/400), Clipper, CLIPS, Common Lisp, Eiffel, Elixir, Elm, Forth, Fortress, Haskell, Icon, Inform, Io, J#, Korn shell, LiveCode, Maple, Modula-2, MQL4, MUMPS, NATURAL, NXT-G, Oberon, OCaml, Occam, OpenEdge ABL, PL/I, PostScript, PowerShell, Pure Data, Q, REXX, Ring, RPG, Simulink, Smalltalk, Solidity, SPARK, Stata, Uniface, Xojo
This Month's Changes in the Index
This month the following changes have been made to the definition of the index:
- There are lots of mails that still need to be processed. As soon as there is more time available your mail will be answered. Please be patient.
Very Long Term History
To see the bigger picture, please find below the positions of the top 10 programming languages of many years back. Please note that these are average positions for a period of 12 months.
| Programming Language | 2021 | 2016 | 2011 | 2006 | 2001 | 1996 | 1991 | 1986 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Java | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 18 | - | - |
| Python | 3 | 5 | 6 | 8 | 26 | 24 | - | - |
| C++ | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 6 |
| C# | 5 | 4 | 5 | 7 | 13 | - | - | - |
| Visual Basic | 6 | 13 | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| JavaScript | 7 | 7 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 22 | - | - |
| PHP | 8 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 10 | - | - | - |
| SQL | 9 | - | - | - | 37 | - | - | - |
| Assembly language | 10 | 11 | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Ada | 31 | 27 | 17 | 17 | 18 | 8 | 5 | 2 |
| Lisp | 34 | 28 | 13 | 13 | 16 | 7 | 8 | 3 |
| (Visual) Basic | - | - | 7 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 5 |
There are 2 important remarks here:
- There is a difference between "Visual Basic" and "(Visual) Basic" in the table above. Until 2010, "(Visual) Basic" referred to all possible dialects of Basic, including Visual Basic. After some discussion, it has been decided to split "(Visual) Basic" into all its dialects such as Visual Basic .NET, Classic Visual Basic, PureBasic, and Small Basic, just to name a few. Since Visual Basic .NET has become the major implementation of Visual Basic, it is now called "Visual Basic".
- The programming language SQL has not been in the TIOBE index for a long time. In 2018, somebody pointed out that SQL is Turing Complete. From that moment on, SQL is part of the TIOBE index. So although this language is very old, it has only a short history in the index.
Programming Language Hall of Fame
The hall of fame listing all "Programming Language of the Year" award winners is shown below. The award is given to the programming language that has the highest rise in ratings in a year.
| Year | Winner |
|---|---|
| 2020 |  Python |
| 2019 | C |
| 2018 | Python |
| 2017 | C |
| 2016 | Go |
| 2015 | Java |
| 2014 | JavaScript |
| 2013 | Transact-SQL |
| 2012 | Objective-C |
| 2011 | Objective-C |
| 2010 | Python |
| 2009 | Go |
| 2008 | C |
| 2007 | Python |
| 2006 | Ruby |
| 2005 | Java |
| 2004 | PHP |
| 2003 | C++ |
Bugs & Change Requests
This is the top 5 of most requested changes and bugs. If you have any suggestions how to improve the index don't hesitate to send an e-mail to tpci@tiobe.com.
- Apart from "<language> programming", also other queries such as "programming with <language>", "<language> development" and "<language> coding" should be tried out.
- Add queries for other natural languages (apart from English). The idea is to start with the Chinese search engine Baidu. This has been implemented partially and will be completed the next few months.
- Add a list of all search term requests that have been rejected. This is to minimize the number of recurring mails about Rails, JQuery, JSP, etc.
- Start a TIOBE index for databases, software configuration management systems and application frameworks.
- Some search engines allow to query pages that have been added last year. The TIOBE index should only track those recently added pages.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- Q: Am I allowed to show the TIOBE index in my weblog/presentation/publication?
A: Yes, the only condition is to refer to its original source "www.tiobe.com".
- Q: How may I nominate a new language to be added to the TIOBE index?
A: If a language meets the criteria of being listed (i.e. it is Turing complete and has an own Wikipedia entry that indicates that it concerns a programming language) and it is sufficiently popular (more than 5,000 hits for +"<language> programming" for Google), then please write an e-mail to tpci@tiobe.com.
- Q: I would like to have the complete data set of the TIOBE index. Is this possible?
A: We spent a lot of effort to obtain all the data and keep the TIOBE index up to date. In order to compensate a bit for this, we ask a fee of 5,000 US$ for the complete data set. The data set runs from June 2001 till today. It started with 25 languages back in 2001, and now measures more than 150 languages once a month. The data are available in comma separated format. Please contact sales@tiobe.com for more information.
- Q: Why is the maximum taken to calculate the ranking for a grouping, why not the sum?
A: Well, you can do it either way and both are wrong. If you take the sum, then you get the intersection twice. If you take the max, then you miss the difference. Which one to choose? Suppose somebody comes up with a new search term that is 10% of the original. If you take the max, nothing changes. If you take the sum then the ratings will rise 10%. So taking the sum will be an incentive for some to come up with all kinds of obscure terms for a language. That's why we decided to take the max.
The proper way to solve this is is of course to take the sum and subtract the intersection. This will give rise to an explosion of extra queries that must be performed. Suppose a language has a grouping of 15 terms, then you have to perform 32,768 queries (all combinations of intersections). So this seems not possible either... If somebody has a solution for this, please let us know.
- Q: What happened to Java in April 2004? Did you change your methodology?
A: No, we did not change our methodology at that time. Google changed its methodology. They performed a general sweep action to get rid of all kinds of web sites that had been pushed up. As a consequence, there was a huge drop for languages such as Java and C++. In order to minimize such fluctuations in the future, we added two more search engines (MSN and Yahoo) a few months after this incident.
