The results are in, and the TIOBE Index has declared C the programming language of the year. It was reported last month that the general-purpose programming language and Kotlin were the top competitors for TIOBE’s 2017 award.

“Surprise, surprise, oldtimer language C appears to be the fastest grower of 2017 in the TIOBE index and thus is declared programming language of the year. The C language gained 1.69 [percent] in 2017. Usually this is not sufficient to become language of the year, so C has actually won because there were no outstanding alternatives,” the index stated.

The TIOBE Index measures popularity of programming languages, and is updated once a month.

While C has held on of the top positions on the TIOBE Programming Community Index in the last several years, it has come a long way. In 2016, the index revealed that interest in C was plummeting as it struggled to compete in the web and mobile development world.

“Despite all this, it is remarkable to see that C is getting more popular after a steep downward trend that started at the end of 2015. C had a rating of more than 17 [percent] at that time and lost more than 10 [percent] after that in the next 18 months. A possible reason for this revival is that C is very popular in the growing manufacturing and machine industry (including the automotive market),” according to the index.

Runners up included Python, which saw a 1.21 percent increase, and Erlang with a 0.98 percent increase.

In addition, the TIOBE Index found the the most interesting improvements of the year were R’s jump from 16 to 8 on the index, Erlang’s jump from 44 to 23, and Kotlin’s jump from 89 to 39.

Other promising languages include: Julia, Hack and Rust.

Last year, the 2016 award went to Google’s programming language Go.

For the month of January, the top programming languages included: Java, C, C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, Visual Basic . NET, R, PHP, and Perl.