Its July 2017, and since last July, there has been a huge shift in the top programming languages, according to the Tiobe index. Though the top 6 languages remain unchanged, all have declined. Visual Basic .NET traded places with Javascript to move into 7th (down from 6th last October), and Delphi/Object Pascal leaped from 12th to 9th. But the most impressive gain came for the upstart Go programming language, which rose from 55th to 10th. This was due to a whopping 2.2% increase in mindshare. Java, the most popular language, has 13.75%.
Rounding out the top 20: perl fell back out of the top ten to 11th; swift (Apple’s replacement for Objective C) rose to 12th; Ruby fell to 13th; Assembly fell out of the top ten to 14th; R, the mathematics friendly language, rose to 15th; Visual Basic dropped to 16th; Matlab dropped a notch to 17th; Objective C plummeted to 18th; teaching language Scratch joined the top 20 at 19th; and PL/SQL, Oracle’s stored procedure language, dropped to 20th.
I noted Go’s impressive rise last October. I wonder if javascript’s drop may in some measure be attributable to Go taking mind share from Node, the server side javascript environment. Delphi’s comeback is a big surprise to me. Visual Basic .NET’s increase matches the declines in legacy Visual Basic and, more interestingly, C#, the other big .NET language, which managed to hold on to it’s 5th place ranking.
Here’s the last year of Tiobe’s graph, stretched out:
As you can see, the year has not been kind to Java or C. Go, on the other hand, had a huge surge near the end of last year, followed by steady growth. It’s crazy that the most popular language is favored by little over 1 in 8 developers.
