Python is now the second-most popular language ―- TIOBE Index

According to the “TIOBE Index for November 2020”, the latest ranking of programming languages announced by TIOBE Software, Python is now the second-most popular programming language. This is the first time for Java and C not to rank at the top two spots ever since the first TIOBE Index was created.

TIOBE Index is a popularity rating created by TIOBE, who tracks software code quality, based on the number of engineers that use the language, courses, and third-party vendors.

C continues to keep the top spot, which hasn’t changed since the previous ranking (conducted in October). Now Python ranks second, which is one spot up from last year. Java came in at the third, dropping one spot. According to TIOBE, it had always been either Java or C to secure the top position and the other being the second, but now for the first time, this structure collapsed. As a side note, Java, C, and Python were in this order to rank the top three spots in the index a year ago.

The upward trend of Python popularity became evident since 2018, and by the latter half of 2019, it secured a stable third position. On the other hand, Java popularity has been declining since April 2020, which led to the prediction of TIOBE that Python would surpass Java. TIOBE “believes this is the case despite claims from others that Python’s popularity is due to booms in data mining, AI, numerical computing, and other initiatives that commonly use Python’s extensive data processing capabilities.” Programming activities used to be performed by software engineers, but now there is more and more demand for programming skills when there aren’t enough software developers. “As a consequence, we need something simple that can be handled by non-software engineers, something easy to learn with fast edit cycles and smooth deployment. Python meets all these needs.”

C++ ranked at the fourth spot followed by C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, PHP, R, and SQL. Keeping the ninth spot since the previous rating in October, R has been inching upward since last year from 16th place. SQL ranked 9th last year but went down one spot this time around. Swift, which was in 10th place last year, is now down to 14th.

TIOBE Software
https://www.tiobe.com