TIOBE Index for December 2021
December Headline: Will C# become the programming language of 2021?
Next month, the TIOBE programming language of the year will be announced. This award is given to the programming language that has had the highest increase in ratings in 2021. At the moment, C# is by far the most likely candidate for this title. It is interesting to note that C# has never won the "TIOBE index programming language of the year award" during its 21 years of existence, although it has been in the top 10 for the last 2 decades. Let's see what happens next month! Other interesting moves in the TIOBE index this month are Swift (from #14 to #10), R (from #15 to #11), and Kotlin (from #33 to #26). -- 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.
| Dec 2021 | Dec 2020 | Change | Programming Language | Ratings | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 |  |  | Python | 12.90% | +0.69% |
| 2 | 1 |  |  | C | 11.80% | -4.69% |
| 3 | 2 | |  | Java | 10.12% | -2.41% |
| 4 | 4 |  | C++ | 7.73% | +0.82% | |
| 5 | 5 |  | C# | 6.40% | +2.21% | |
| 6 | 6 |  | Visual Basic | 5.40% | +1.48% | |
| 7 | 7 |  | JavaScript | 2.30% | -0.06% | |
| 8 | 12 |  |  | Assembly language | 2.25% | +0.91% |
| 9 | 10 | |  | SQL | 1.79% | +0.26% |
| 10 | 13 | |  | Swift | 1.76% | +0.54% |
| 11 | 9 | |  | R | 1.58% | -0.01% |
| 12 | 8 |  |  | PHP | 1.50% | -0.62% |
| 13 | 23 | |  | Classic Visual Basic | 1.27% | +0.56% |
| 14 | 11 | |  | Groovy | 1.23% | -0.30% |
| 15 | 15 |  | Ruby | 1.16% | -0.01% | |
| 16 | 18 | |  | Delphi/Object Pascal | 1.14% | +0.27% |
| 17 | 32 | |  | Fortran | 1.04% | +0.59% |
| 18 | 14 | |  | Perl | 0.96% | -0.24% |
| 19 | 16 | |  | Go | 0.95% | -0.19% |
| 20 | 17 | |  | MATLAB | 0.92% | -0.18% |
Other programming languages
The complete top 50 of programming languages is listed below. This overview is published unofficially, because it could be the case that we missed a language. If you have the impression there is a programming language lacking, please notify us at tpci@tiobe.com. Please also check the overview of all programming languages that we monitor.
| Position | Programming Language | Ratings |
|---|---|---|
| 21 | SAS | 0.86% |
| 22 | (Visual) FoxPro | 0.82% |
| 23 | COBOL | 0.68% |
| 24 | Scratch | 0.60% |
| 25 | Prolog | 0.60% |
| 26 | Kotlin | 0.57% |
| 27 | Rust | 0.45% |
| 28 | PL/SQL | 0.43% |
| 29 | Objective-C | 0.42% |
| 30 | Ada | 0.41% |
| 31 | Lisp | 0.41% |
| 32 | Lua | 0.40% |
| 33 | Scala | 0.30% |
| 34 | VBScript | 0.28% |
| 35 | Julia | 0.27% |
| 36 | Logo | 0.26% |
| 37 | Dart | 0.26% |
| 38 | D | 0.24% |
| 39 | ABAP | 0.22% |
| 40 | PowerShell | 0.22% |
| 41 | TypeScript | 0.21% |
| 42 | RPG | 0.20% |
| 43 | Ladder Logic | 0.19% |
| 44 | ML | 0.18% |
| 45 | Apex | 0.18% |
| 46 | Haskell | 0.18% |
| 47 | LabVIEW | 0.17% |
| 48 | Awk | 0.16% |
| 49 | Verilog | 0.16% |
| 50 | Tcl | 0.16% |
The Next 50 Programming Languages
The following list of languages denotes #51 to #100. Since the differences are relatively small, the programming languages are only listed (in alphabetical order).
- ABC, ActionScript, Alice, APL, B4X, Ballerina, Bash, Boo, Bourne shell, C shell, CFML, Clipper, CLIPS, Clojure, Curl, Eiffel, Erlang, F#, Factor, Haxe, Icon, Inform, Io, J#, JScript, Korn shell, Lingo, LiveCode, M4, MQL4, NATURAL, Nim, NXT-G, OCaml, Occam, OpenCL, OpenEdge ABL, PostScript, Q, Racket, REXX, Ring, Scheme, SPARK, SPSS, Transact-SQL, Vala/Genie, VHDL, XSLT, Zig
This Month's Changes in the Index
This month the following changes have been made to the definition of the index:
- David Heurtevent suggested to add the term "WASM" to the WebAssembly language. Thanks a lot David.
- There are lots of mails that still need to be processed. As soon as there is more time available your mail will be answered. Please be patient.
Very Long Term History
To see the bigger picture, please find below the positions of the top 10 programming languages of many years back. Please note that these are average positions for a period of 12 months.
| Programming Language | 2021 | 2016 | 2011 | 2006 | 2001 | 1996 | 1991 | 1986 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Python | 2 | 5 | 7 | 8 | 20 | 27 | - | - |
| Java | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 15 | - | - |
| C++ | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 5 |
| C# | 5 | 4 | 4 | 7 | 11 | - | - | - |
| Visual Basic | 6 | 13 | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| JavaScript | 7 | 7 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 20 | - | - |
| PHP | 8 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 10 | - | - | - |
| Assembly language | 9 | 10 | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| SQL | 10 | - | - | - | 35 | - | - | - |
| Fortran | 20 | 26 | 29 | 21 | 25 | 7 | 3 | 8 |
| Ada | 28 | 30 | 17 | 17 | 18 | 11 | 4 | 2 |
| Lisp | 32 | 27 | 13 | 13 | 16 | 8 | 7 | 3 |
| (Visual) Basic | - | - | 8 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 8 | 6 |
There are 2 important remarks here:
- There is a difference between "Visual Basic" and "(Visual) Basic" in the table above. Until 2010, "(Visual) Basic" referred to all possible dialects of Basic, including Visual Basic. After some discussion, it has been decided to split "(Visual) Basic" into all its dialects such as Visual Basic .NET, Classic Visual Basic, PureBasic, and Small Basic, just to name a few. Since Visual Basic .NET has become the major implementation of Visual Basic, it is now called "Visual Basic".
- The programming language SQL has not been in the TIOBE index for a long time. In 2018, somebody pointed out that SQL is Turing Complete. From that moment on, SQL is part of the TIOBE index. So although this language is very old, it has only a short history in the index.
Programming Language Hall of Fame
The hall of fame listing all "Programming Language of the Year" award winners is shown below. The award is given to the programming language that has the highest rise in ratings in a year.
| Year | Winner |
|---|---|
| 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++ |
