Python nabs programming language of the year honors

For the second consecutive year, Python has been named TIobe’s programming language of the year, a distinction the company awards to the language with the highest increase in ratings – or popularity – for the year 2021.

Python’s year-over-year increase in popularity was 1.86 percent, according to Tiobe, with a year-end rating of 13.58 percent in the Tiobe index. Tiobe noted this was still far below Java’s all-time record of 26.49 percent achieved in 2001. Tiobe said C# was on its way to becoming the language of the year but was surpassed by Python in the last month.

Python, which has become a staple in data science, devops, and web development, also is now the most popular language in Tiobe’s rankings. Ranking as the third most popular language in the index at the beginning of 2021, Python ascended to the top spot in October.

The monthly Tiobe Programming Community index draws on popular search engines to assess language popularity, based on the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses, and third-party vendors pertinent to a language. Tiobe, which provides software quality services, identifies Swift, Go, Rust, and Kotlin as languages on an upward trajectory in the index.

The top 10 languages in the Tiobe index for January 2022 were as follows:

1. Python, 13.58 percent
2. C, 12.44 percent
3. Java 10.66 percent
4. C++, 8.29 percent
5. C#, 5.68 percent
6. Visual Basic, 4.74 percent
7. JavaScript, 2.09 percent
8. Assembly, 1.85 percent
9. SQL, 1.8 percent
10. Swift, 1.41 percent

Python also topped this month’s Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index, which analyzes how often language tutorials are searched in Google. The Pypl top 10 for January 2022 were as follows:

1. Python, 28.74 percent
2. Java, 18.01 percent
3. JavaScript, 9.07 percent
4. C/C++, 7.4 percent
5. C#, 7.27 percent
6. PHP, 6.06 percent
7. R, 4.19 percent
8. Objective-C, 2.27 percent
9. Swift, 1.91 percent
10. TypeScript, 1.74 percent