Python a shoo-in for Tiobe language of the year

High-flying Python is expected to win the Tiobe programming language of the year designation for 2024, as the language with the biggest ratings increase in Tiobe’s language popularity index during the year. Python also ranks as the most popular programming language in the index overall.

Although Tiobe won’t reveal the actual winner until January, Python has had largest increase in ratings in the index in 2024, with a 10% increase. Java has had the second largest, with an increase of 1.73%, closely followed by JavaScript, with an increase of 1.72%.

Python previously won the award for 2020 and 2021, followed by C++ for 2022 and C# for 2023. “Python is unstoppable thanks to its support for AI and data mining, its large set of libraries, and its ease of learning,” Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe, said in comments accompanying this month’s index, which was posted December 9. “Now that some say that the AI bubble is about to burst plus the fact that demand for fast languages is rapidly increasing, Python might start to plateau.”

Tiobe gauges programming language popularity by assessing the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses, and third-party vendors pertinent to each language, with ratings calculated by examining popular websites such as Google, Bing, and Wikipedia.

The Tiobe index top 10 for the month of December 2024:

Python, with a rating of 23.84%

C++, 10.82%

Java, 9.72%

C, 9.1%

C#, 4.87%

JavaScript, 4.61%

Go, 2.17%

SQL, 1.99%

Visual Basic, 1.96%

Fortran, 1.79%

The rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index assesses language popularity by how often languages are searched on in Google.

The Pypl index top 10 for the month of December 2024:

Python, with a 29.71% share

Java, 15.43%

JavaScript, 7.99%

C/C++, 7.06%

C#, 6.42%

R, 4.67%

PHP, 3.97%

TypeScript, 2.87%

Rust, 2.66%

Objective-C, 2.62%