July Headline: All time high for the R programming language
The statistical programming language R has set a new record by moving from position 9 to position 8 this month. Some time ago it seemed like Python had won the battle of statistical programming, but R's popularity is still increasing in the slipstream of Python. There are 2 trends that might boost the R language: 1) the days of commercial statistical languages and packages such as SAS, Stata and SPSS are over. Universities and research institutes embrace Python and R for their stasticial analyses, 2) lots of statistics and data mining need to be done to find a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus. As a consequence, statistical programming languages that are easy to learn and use, gain popularity now. Other interesting moves this month are Rust (from #20 to #18), Kotlin (from #30 to #27) and Delphi/Object Pascal (from #22 to #30). - 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.