The TIOBE Programming Community Index is an indicator that measures the popularity of programming languages. The judgment is based on engineers, courses, suppliers and search engines from around the world. The TIOBE official website recently announced the programming language rankings for August 2023.
In this list, Python still ranks first, accounting for 13.33%. C ranked second, accounting for 11.41%, and C++ ranked third, accounting for 10.63%. In addition, Java ranks fourth, accounting for 10.33%, C# ranks fifth, accounting for 7.04%, and JavaScript maintains sixth place on the list this month, accounting for 3.29%.
While most languages are familiar faces, this month is a little different - Julia has entered the top 20 of the TIOBE list for the first time in history! The creation of Julia began at MIT in 2009. Compared with other programming languages in the Top 20, it is a relatively young language.
As a high-level general-purpose dynamic programming language in scientific computing, Julia was originally born to meet the needs of high-performance numerical analysis and computational science, and it can really achieve both high productivity and efficiency. Not only is the performance comparable to C and Fortran, but the coding style is as flexible as Python. Therefore, a few years ago, the saying "Julia will replace Python" often appeared in the developer circle.
The reason for Julia's sudden rise may be similar to the reason for Python's popularity: Julia is particularly suitable for the fields of data science and mathematical computing, and the AI craze in recent months seems to have also driven the use of Julia.
TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen analyzed that although Julia is similar to Python, R and MATLAB in the Top 20, Julia’s advantages are not inferior: “Julia is faster than Python and more suitable for writing large systems than R. It is also cheaper than MATLAB. Therefore, speed, scalability and open source make Julia an attractive choice."
However, Paul Jansen also said that Julia requires more programming skills than the above three languages. It is very exciting to see whether Julia can maintain and improve her ranking in the future.