December Headline: The winners continue to win
TIOBE will announce the programming language of the year next month. There are 4 candidates for this title: Java (+1.3%), C (+1.8%), Python (+1.9%) and C# (+1.4%). These 4 languages are all in the top 5. Only C++ lost some ranking points in 2019. Python is top favorite for the title. It was already programming language of the year 2018, but its popularity keeps growing. This is mainly due to the lack of programmers in the world and the ease of learning this language if compared to other languages. C is also doing well thanks to the rise of Internet of Things. Why Java and C# are doing well is unclear, but it would be the first time that C# becomes the programming language of the year. Let's see what will happen next month!
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.
