Python is the first programming language to climb to an 18% rating since Java, which rated 18% nearly eight years ago.
Python has scored its highest rating ever, 18.04%, in Tiobe’s index of programming language popularity for August 2024. Python became the first language to reach 18% mark since Java in November 2016. Java still holds the highest rating ever in the index, at 26.49% in June 2001.
Today Python is firmly established as the index’s top language, first climbing to the number one spot in October 2021. “The rise [of Python] is primarily because there is huge demand for software engineers and Python is the ‘easiest to learn’ mature general-purpose programming language available,” said Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality company Tiobe. “So all newcomers in the field start with Python.”
The August 2024 index was published August 4. Python now has an eight-point lead over second-place C++, which has a rating of 10.04%. Also in the August index, the Rust language, which reached its highest spot ever last month at 13th place, dropped to 14th place. “Don’t worry about the drop of Rust,” Jansen said. “Next month it will rise again,” he predicted.
Elsewhere, the C language and Java, with ratings of 9.17% and 9.16% respectively, took third and fourth place in this month’s index.
Officially called the Tiobe Programming Community Index, the monthly index is based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses, and third party vendors, using websites such as Google, Bing, Amazon, and Wikipedia to assess popularity.
The top 10 languages in the Tiobe index for August 2024:
- Python, 18.04%
- C++, 10.04%
- C, 9.17%
- Java, 9.16%
- C#, 6.39%
- JavaScript, 3.91%
- SQL, 2.21%
- Visual Basic, 2.18%
- Go, 2.03%
- Fortran, 1.79%
The rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index for August also has Python firmly established as its number one language. The Pypl index assesses popularity by analyzing how often languages are searched on Google.
The top 10 languages in the Pypl index for August 2024:
- Python, 29.6%
- Java, 15.51%
- JavaScript, 8.38%
- C#, 6.7%
- C/C++, 6.31%
- R, 4.6%
- PHP, 4.35%
- TypeScript, 2.93%
- Swift, 2.76%
- Rust, 2.58%
