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TIOBE Index for December 2020

December Headline: Python on its way to become TIOBE's language of the year for the fourth time

TIOBE will announce its programming language of the year 2020 next month. The programming language that got the highest increase in ratings in one year time will win this title. Python is far ahead with a positive delta of +1.90% at the moment. Runner ups are C++ (+0.71%), R (+0.60%) and Groovy (+0.69%). Chances are very low that any language will come close to Python this last month of the year. This means that Python is probably going to win the title for the fourth time, which is a record in the history of the TIOBE index. This month, there were also some interesting moves among the 5 high potential languages: Rust moved from position #25 to #21, Julia from #30 to #26, Dart from #27 to #31, Kotlin from #36 to #40 and TypeScript from #43 to #42. - 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.

Dec 2020 Dec 2019 Change Programming Language Ratings Change 12C16.48%+0.40%21Java12.53%-4.72%33Python12.21%+1.90%44C++6.91%+0.71%55C#4.20%-0.60%66Visual Basic3.92%-0.83%77JavaScript2.35%+0.26%88PHP2.12%+0.07%916R1.60%+0.60%109SQL1.53%-0.31%1122Groovy1.53%+0.69%1214Assembly language1.35%+0.28%1310Swift1.22%-0.27%1420Perl1.20%+0.30%1511Ruby1.16%-0.15%1615Go1.14%+0.15%1717MATLAB1.10%+0.12%1812Delphi/Object Pascal0.87%-0.41%1913Objective-C0.81%-0.39%2024PL/SQL0.78%+0.04%

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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 [email protected]. Please also check the overview of all programming languages that we monitor.

PositionProgramming LanguageRatings21Rust0.78%22SAS0.77%23Classic Visual Basic0.71%24Scratch0.67%25Transact-SQL0.59%26Julia0.56%27Lisp0.55%28Logo0.51%29D0.50%30ABAP0.47%31Dart0.45%32Fortran0.45%33COBOL0.43%34Ada0.40%35Prolog0.40%36Scheme0.37%37Scala0.36%38VHDL0.34%39PowerShell0.34%40Kotlin0.32%41(Visual) FoxPro0.30%42TypeScript0.30%43Lua0.30%44Alice0.28%45LabVIEW0.26%46ML0.26%47Apex0.25%48Crystal0.25%49Solidity0.24%50Tcl0.23%

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).

• ABC, ActionScript, Applescript, AutoLISP, Awk, Bash, bc, Bourne shell, C shell, CL (OS/400), Clojure, CoffeeScript, Common Lisp, cT, Elixir, Elm, Emacs Lisp, Erlang, F#, Factor, Forth, Hack, Haskell, Icon, Inform, Io, J, Korn shell, Ladder Logic, Maple, Mercury, MQL4, NATURAL, OCaml, OpenCL, OpenEdge ABL, Oz, PL/I, Q, Raku, REXX, Ring, RPG, Smalltalk, SPARK, SPSS, Stata, Vala/Genie, VBScript, Verilog

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This Month's Changes in the Index

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

• One of the inventors of the Emerald programming language, Eric Jul, suggested to add Emerald to the TIOBE index because it meets all criteria. Emerald entered the TIOBE index at position #174. Thanks Eric!
• 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.

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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 Language20202015201020052000199519901985C12211111Java2112329--Python35672213--C++43332228C#545610---JavaScript6810107---PHP764419---SQL8-------R91446-----Swift1015------Lisp292614139642Fortran31212414131435Ada3423211617393

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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.

YearWinner2019 C2018 Python2017 C2016 Go2015 Java2014 JavaScript2013 Transact-SQL2012 Objective-C2011 Objective-C2010 Python2009 Go2008 C2007 Python2006 Ruby2005 Java2004 PHP2003 C++

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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 [email protected].

1. Apart from "<language> programming", also other queries such as "programming with <language>", "<language> development" and "<language> coding" should be tried out.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Start a TIOBE index for databases, software configuration management systems and application frameworks.
5. Some search engines allow to query pages that have been added last year. The TIOBE index should only track those recently added pages.

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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 [email protected].

• 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 [email protected] 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.