TIOBE Index for September 2020

September Headline: Programming Language C++ is doing very well

Back in 2003, the programming language C++ was a real winner. It peaked at 17.53% in August 2003, being close to the number #2 position and becoming winner of the programming language award of 2003. From then on C++ went downhill. After 2005 it didn't hit the 10% any more and in 2017 it scored an all time low of 4.55%. But if compared to last year, C++ is now the fastest growing language of the pack (+1.48%). I think that the new C++20 standard might be one of the main causes for this. Especially because of the new modules feature that is going to replace the dreadful include mechanism. C++ beats other languages with a positive trend such as R (+1.33%) and C# (+1.18%). On the other hand, Java is in real trouble with a loss of -3.18% in comparison to last year. - 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.

Sep 2020 Sep 2019 Change Programming Language Ratings Change 1 2 C 15.95% +0.74% 2 1 Java 13.48% -3.18% 3 3 Python 10.47% +0.59% 4 4 C++ 7.11% +1.48% 5 5 C# 4.58% +1.18% 6 6 Visual Basic 4.12% +0.83% 7 7 JavaScript 2.54% +0.41% 8 9 PHP 2.49% +0.62% 9 19 R 2.37% +1.33% 10 8 SQL 1.76% -0.19% 11 14 Go 1.46% +0.24% 12 16 Swift 1.38% +0.28% 13 20 Perl 1.30% +0.26% 14 12 Assembly language 1.30% -0.08% 15 15 Ruby 1.24% +0.03% 16 18 MATLAB 1.10% +0.04% 17 11 Groovy 0.99% -0.52% 18 33 Rust 0.92% +0.55% 19 10 Objective-C 0.85% -0.99% 20 24 Dart 0.77% +0.13%

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 Logo 0.76% 22 Classic Visual Basic 0.75% 23 SAS 0.75% 24 Scratch 0.73% 25 PL/SQL 0.67% 26 Transact-SQL 0.61% 27 D 0.58% 28 Julia 0.55% 29 Delphi/Object Pascal 0.53% 30 ABAP 0.52% 31 Scala 0.52% 32 Scheme 0.47% 33 COBOL 0.43% 34 Kotlin 0.41% 35 Lisp 0.40% 36 OpenEdge ABL 0.38% 37 Fortran 0.36% 38 Ada 0.34% 39 Lua 0.33% 40 LabVIEW 0.31% 41 Prolog 0.29% 42 TypeScript 0.28% 43 VBScript 0.26% 44 Haskell 0.26% 45 Hack 0.24% 46 Apex 0.23% 47 PowerShell 0.23% 48 Bash 0.22% 49 Clojure 0.22% 50 MQL4 0.21%

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).

(Visual) FoxPro, ABC, ActionScript, Alice, Arc, Awk, bc, Bourne shell, C shell, CL (OS/400), CoffeeScript, Crystal, cT, Elixir, Emacs Lisp, Erlang, F#, Factor, Forth, Icon, IDL, Inform, Io, Korn shell, Ladder Logic, Limbo, Lingo, Maple, MEL, Mercury, ML, NATURAL, OpenCL, Oz, PostScript, Pure Data, Q, Raku, Ring, RPG, Snap!, SPARK, SPSS, Standard ML, Stata, Tcl, Tex, Vala/Genie, Verilog, VHDL

This Month's Changes in the Index

This month the following changes have been made to the definition of the index:

The programming language Ballerina has been added to the list of programming languages that are tracked. Ballerina debuts at position #133 of the TIOBE 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 2020 2015 2010 2005 2000 1995 1990 1985 Java 1 2 1 2 3 - - - C 2 1 2 1 1 2 1 1 Python 3 7 6 6 20 20 - - C++ 4 3 3 3 2 1 2 9 C# 5 5 5 7 9 - - - JavaScript 6 8 8 10 6 - - - PHP 7 6 4 5 19 - - - SQL 8 - - - - - - - Swift 9 16 - - - - - - R 10 12 52 - - - - - Lisp 27 24 15 14 8 6 4 2 Fortran 31 25 24 15 15 4 3 5 Ada 33 27 23 17 17 5 9 3 Pascal 241 15 14 22 16 3 10 6

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 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)