Hello, everyone, I'm the Wolf at the End of the Desert. I saw the screenshot of the great news sent by Gui Suwei in my Moments, so the site admin quickly translated it and shared the joy with everyone: it's confirmed—C# is the programming language of the year 2023!
In the history of the TIOBE index, C# has won the Programming Language of the Year award for the first time. Congratulations! For over two decades, C# has been a top 10 contender, and now it is catching up with the big four. It earned this well-deserved award with the largest annual increase (+1.43%). Close behind are Scratch (+0.83%) and Fortran (+0.64%). C# is eating into Java's market share and is gaining popularity in areas such as web application backends and games (thanks to Unity). C# is free to use (site admin's note: .NET is open source under the MIT license, free and cross-platform, great for domestic IT innovation), and it evolves at a steady pace, making the language more expressive with each new version. C# is here to stay, and it might even surpass Java soon.
Besides C#, there were many other interesting changes in the TIOBE index last year. Fortran and Kotlin have become permanent members of the top 20, replacing long-time popular languages R and Perl. Fortran is excellent for numerical processing with great libraries and remains a favorite in many academic fields. Kotlin is an easy-to-learn/write competitor to Java. An interesting question: Which languages will enter the top 20 of the TIOBE index in 2024? It's hard to predict. Julia briefly touched the TIOBE index in 2023 but failed to hold its position. The Julia language and community need to mature to get a second chance. I would bet on Dart (along with Flutter) and TypeScript. The latter is already widely used in industry, but for some reason, it hasn't broken into the TIOBE index yet. Let's see what 2024 brings. — Paul Jansen, CEO of 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, courses, and third-party vendors worldwide. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. Note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which the 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 which programming language to adopt when building a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.
| Jan 2024 | Jan 2023 | Change | Programming Language Logo | Programming Language | Rating | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  |
Python | 13.97% | -2.39% | |
| 2 | 2 |  |
C | 11.44% | -4.81% | |
| 3 | 3 |  |
C++ | 9.96% | -2.95% | |
| 4 | 4 |  |
Java | 7.87% | -4.34% | |
| 5 | 5 |  |
C# | 7.16% | +1.43% | |
| 6 | 7 |  |
 |
JavaScript | 2.77% | -0.11% |
| 7 | 10 | |
 |
PHP | 1.79% | +0.40% |
| 8 | 6 |  |
 |
Visual Basic | 1.60% | -3.04% |
| 9 | 8 | |
 |
SQL | 1.46% | -1.04% |
| 10 | 20 |  |
 |
Scratch | 1.44% | +0.86% |
| 11 | 12 | |
 |
Go | 1.38% | +0.23% |
| 12 | 27 | |
 |
Fortran | 1.09% | +0.64% |
| 13 | 17 | |
 |
Delphi/Object Pascal | 1.09% | +0.36% |
| 14 | 15 | |
 |
MATLAB | 0.97% | +0.06% |
| 15 | 9 |  |
 |
Assembly language | 0.92% | -0.68% |
| 16 | 11 | |
 |
Swift | 0.89% | -0.31% |
| 17 | 25 | |
 |
Kotlin | 0.85% | +0.37% |
| 18 | 16 | |
 |
Ruby | 0.80% | +0.01% |
| 19 | 18 | |
 |
Rust | 0.79% | +0.18% |
| 20 | 31 | |
 |
COBOL | 0.78% | +0.45% |
Other Programming Languages
The following is the complete list of the top 50 programming languages. This overview is unofficial because there may be languages we missed. If you think a programming language is missing, please notify us at tpci@tiobe.com. Also check our overview of all programming languages we monitor.
| Position | Programming Language | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| 21 | D | 0.77% |
| 22 | F# | 0.77% |
| 23 | R | 0.74% |
| 24 | SAS | 0.70% |
| 25 | (Visual) FoxPro | 0.67% |
| 26 | Ada | 0.62% |
| 27 | Classic Visual Basic | 0.60% |
| 28 | Prolog | 0.56% |
| 29 | VBScript | 0.55% |
| 30 | Perl | 0.52% |
| 31 | Objective-C | 0.46% |
| 32 | Dart | 0.43% |
| 33 | Julia | 0.40% |
| 34 | X++ | 0.39% |
| 35 | TypeScript | 0.39% |
| 36 | Lua | 0.37% |
| 37 | Scala | 0.34% |
| 38 | GAMS | 0.33% |
| 39 | Transact-SQL | 0.30% |
| 40 | Logo | 0.30% |
| 41 | ABAP | 0.29% |
| 42 | Lisp | 0.28% |
| 43 | CFML | 0.28% |
| 44 | Haskell | 0.28% |
| 45 | PL/SQL | 0.27% |
| 46 | Awk | 0.27% |
| 47 | Eiffel | 0.24% |
| 48 | Smalltalk | 0.23% |
| 49 | ML | 0.23% |
| 50 | ActionScript | 0.23% |
The Next 50 Programming Languages
The following list represents languages from position 51 to 100. Because the differences are relatively small, the programming languages are listed only in alphabetical order.
- Algol, AutoLISP, Avenue, Bash, bc, Boo, CIL, CL (OS/400), CLIPS, Clojure, CLU, Curl, DiBOL, Erlang, Forth, Hack, Icon, Io, J, J#, JScript, LabVIEW, Ladder Logic, Lingo, LiveCode, M4, Maple, MQL5, NATURAL, Nim, OpenEdge ABL, PL/I, PostScript, PowerShell, Pure Data, Q, Racket, REXX, Ring, RPG, Scheme, Snap!, Solidity, SPARK, SPSS, Squirrel, Stata, Wolfram, Xojo, XQuery
A Rather Long History
To see the bigger picture, find below the positions of the top 10 programming languages over the years. Note that these are averages.
| Programming Language | 2024 | 2019 | 2014 | 2009 | 2004 | 1999 | 1994 | 1989 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Python | 1 | 4 | 8 | 6 | 11 | 22 | 22 | - |
| C | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| C++ | 3 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 3 |
| Java | 4 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 16 | - | - |
| C# | 5 | 6 | 5 | 8 | 9 | 32 | - | - |
| JavaScript | 6 | 8 | 9 | 9 | 8 | 21 | - | - |
| Visual Basic | 7 | 19 | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| PHP | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 6 | - | - | - |
| SQL | 9 | 9 | - | - | 7 | - | - | - |
| Assembly language | 10 | 13 | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Objective-C | 27 | 11 | 3 | 42 | 48 | - | - | - |
| Lisp | 30 | 28 | 14 | 17 | 15 | 10 | 7 | 2 |
| (Visual) Basic | - | - | 7 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 7 |
Two important remarks here:
- In the table above, there is a distinction between "Visual Basic" and "(Visual) Basic". Until 2010, "(Visual) Basic" referred to all possible sub-languages of Basic, including Visual Basic. After some discussion, it was decided to split "(Visual) Basic" into all sub-languages, such as Visual Basic .NET, Classic Visual Basic, PureBasic, and Small Basic, to name a few. Since Visual Basic .NET has become the main implementation of Visual Basic, it is now called "Visual Basic".
- In 2018, the programming language SQL was added to the TIOBE index after it was pointed out that SQL is Turing complete. Therefore, despite this language being very old, it has a short history in the index.
Programming Language Hall of Fame
As shown below, the Hall of Fame lists all winners of the "Programming Language of the Year" award. This award is given to the programming language with the highest increase in ratings in one year.
| Year | Programming Language of the Year |
|---|---|
| 2023 |  C# |
| 2022 | C++ |
| 2021 | Python |
| 2020 | Python |
| 2019 | C |
| 2018 | Python |
| 2017 | C |
| 2016 | Go |
| 2015 | Java |
| 2014 | JavaScript |
| 2013 | Transact-SQL |
| 2012 | Objective-C |
| 2011 | Objective-C |
| 2010 | Python |
| 2009 | Go |
| 2008 | C |
| 2007 | Python |
| 2006 | Ruby |
| 2005 | Java |
| 2004 | PHP |
| 2003 | C++ |
Thanks to Gui Suwei for sharing the news in his Moments. Here is the original link: TIOBE Index. Translated by the Wolf at the End of the Desert. Let's all celebrate!