TIOBE attributes Groovy's resurgence to its use by DevOps engineers.

Yet more good news for Java programmers as spin-off language Groovy soars in popularity in the lucrative field of DevOps.

Not only is Java consistently reported to be highly-paid and in demand, but Groovy is increasingly popular for automating the deployment and management of systems infrastructure, according to the February 2019 TIOBE Index report.

The latest report shows Groovy re-entering the index's top 20 ranking of most popular programming languages for the first time since 2016.

TIOBE attributes Groovy's resurgence to its use by DevOps engineers in writing scripts for continuous integration tool Jenkins and build automation system Gradle, with the report stating that "in general more and more glue software is written in Groovy".

SEE: Job description: Java developer (Tech Pro Research)

The TIOBE Index attempts to estimate the popularity of languages worldwide based on results from major search engines. The index is sometimes criticized for being a rather blunt measure, likely to be influenced by a range of factors beyond a language's popularity, however other indicators are reflecting the increasing use of Groovy.

IT Jobs Watch ranked Groovy as one of the best-paying programming languages last year, and the related field of DevOps was the ranked the fifth highest-paying tech job in the US by the Dice 2019 Tech Salary Report, earning an average of $111,683 per year.

Java developers seem to be in a good spot in 2019, singled out as enjoying the fastest-rising salaries by Glassdoor, and with the related languages of Groovy, Kotlin and Scala highlighted as some of the most well-rewarded languages around.

According to Groovy's creators, the language is designed to be "as natural as possible for Java developers" to learn and is interoperable with Java, thanks to compiling to bytecode that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

One fact to bear in mind, however, is that there are likely to be far fewer posts seeking skills in Groovy than Java, which enjoys high demand due to its longstanding use by enterprise to write server-side apps, as well as being one of the main languages used to write Android apps.

Java also occupies the top spot in this month's TIOBE Index, followed by C and then Python, yet another sign that Python's use in the burgeoning field of data science continues to fuel its growth.

Also out is the PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language February ranking. Based on Google searches for language tutorials, it found Python was the most searched for language, up 5.2 percentage points from last year, followed by Java, JavaScript, C# and PHP.

The most popular programming languages in February 2019 - TIOBE Index

Feb 2019 Feb 2018 Programming Language Ratings Change 1 1 Java 15.876% +0.89% 2 2 C 12.424% +0.57% 3 4 Python 7.574% +2.41% 4 3 C++ 7.444% +1.72% 5 6 Visual Basic .NET 7.095% +3.02% 6 8 JavaScript 2.848% -0.32% 7 5 C# 2.846% -1.61% 8 7 PHP 2.271% -1.15% 9 11 SQL 1.900% -0.46% 10 20 Objective-C 1.447% +0.32% 11 15 Assembly language 1.377% -0.46% 12 19 MATLAB 1.196% -0.03% 13 17 Perl 1.102% -0.66% 14 9 Delphi/Object Pascal 1.066% -1.52% 15 13 R 1.043% -1.04% 16 10 Ruby 1.037% -1.50% 17 12 Visual Basic 0.991% -1.19% 18 18 Go 0.960% -0.46% 19 49 Groovy 0.936% +0.75% 20 16 Swift 0.918% -0.88%

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