Kotlin keeps climbing the Tiobe popularity index

JetBrains’ Kotlin language, a Java rival endorsed by Google for Android mobile development, continues to scale up Tiobe’s index of language popularity, reaching the 15th spot in the November 2023 rankings.

Having cracked the top 20 in the Tiobe Index in September with a rating of .9%, Kotlin scored a rating of 1.15% this month. Kotlin ranked 18th last month.

Software quality services company Tiobe cites Kotlin advantages including interoperability with Java and unrivaled Android accommodations as reasons for the language’s rise. Kotlin, Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen said, also fits in with a modern programming culture of expressive languages that have a strong type system and avoid null pointer exceptions by design.

“Based on my experience, I am pretty sure Kotlin can reach a top 10 position,” Jansen said. It remains to be seen if it can ever scale as high as a top four slot, he added.

Tiobe’s index is based on a formula that assesses the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors for each language worldwide, by examining data in search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

In the rival Pypl Popularity of Programming languages index this month, Kotlin was ranked 13th with a 1.76% share, having slipped slightly year-over-year. Pypl assesses language popularity based on how often language tutorials are searched in Google.

The Tiobe index top 10 for November 2023:

1. Python, with a rating of 14.16%
2. C, 11.77%
3. C++, 10.36%
4. Java, 8.35%
5. C#, 7.65%
6. JavaScript, 3.21%
7. PHP, 2.3%
8. Visual Basic, 2.1%
9. SQL, 1.88%
10. Assembly, 1.35%

The Pypl index top 10 for November 2023:

1. Python, with a 27.99% share
2. Java, 15.91%
3. JavaScript, 9.18%
4. C/C++, 6.76%
5. C#, 6.67%
6. PHP, 4.86%
7. R, 4.45%
8. TypeScript, 2.95%
9. Swift, 2.7%
10. Objective-C, 2.32%