Ada, other older languages vie for top spots in Tiobe language index

Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen says Ada, a system programming language whose initial development dates back to the late 1970s, could outlast similarly aged languages like Visual Basic, Perl, and Fortran in the language popularity race.

In comments on this month’s Tiobe language popularity index, posted July 9, Jansen said the index has not seen much change among leading languages such as Python, C#, and Java over the past two years. But there is more movement among older languages such as Visual Basic, SQL, Fortran, Ada, Perl, and Delphi, said Jansen.

Every time one of these languages is expected to stay in the top 10, it is replaced by another language, he said. Even more remarkably, newer languages have yet to rise above them. “Where are Rust, Kotlin, Dart, and Julia? Apparently, established languages are hot.” While it’s hard to tell which of the older languages will continue to hold, Jansen said he would bet on Ada. “With the ever-stronger demands on security, Ada is, as a system programming language in the safety-critical domain, likely the best survivor.” Ada is ranked 10^th in this month’s index, though it is tied with Delphi/Object Pascal.

The Tiobe Programming Community Index calculates language popularity based on assessing the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses, and third-party vendors pertinent to a language. Popular websites such as Google, Wikipedia, Bing, Amazon, and more than 20 others are used to formulate the ratings.

The Tiobe Index lists this month’s top 10 languages as follows:

1. Python (26.98%)
2. C++ (9.8%)
3. C (9.65%)
4. Java (8.76%)
5. C# (4.87%)
6. JavaScript (3.36%)
7. Go (Golang) (2.04%)
8. Visual Basic (1.94%)
9. Ada (1.77%)
10.  Delphi/Object Pascal (1.77%)

In the rival Pypl PopularitY of Programming Language index, which gauges language popularity by analyzing Google searches for programming language tutorials, July’s top 10 are:

1. Python (31.47%)
2. Java (15.22%)
3. JavaScript (7.65%)
4. C/C++ (7.05%)
5. C# (5.81%)
6. R (4.88%)
7. PHP (3.55%)
8. TypeScript (2.76%)
9. Objective-C (2.76%)
10. Rust (2.72%)