Python popularity still soaring

Nearly a year after Python first topped Tiobe’s index of programming language popularity, the language continues to score high with developers.

In the just-published August 2022 rankings, Python once again topped the chart as the most popular programming language, gaining two percentage points since last month to register a 15.42% market share, an all time high for the language. Python first took the top spot in the index last October, becoming the only language besides Java and C to hold the No. 1 position.

“Python seems to be unstoppable,” said the Tiobe commentary accompanying the August index. The Tiobe index is based on a formula that assesses the results of searches on the languages in leading search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing and websites such as Wikipedia.

“It is hard to find a field of programming in which Python is not used extensively nowadays. The only exception is (safety-critical) embedded systems because of Python being dynamically typed and too slow,” Tiobe’s commentary noted. C and C++, meanwhile, are being leveraged for embedded systems, said Tiobe, which provides software quality management services.

In other Tiobe index results for August, Rust ranked No. 22, closing in on the top 20, while Carbon, recently unveiled as a potential successor to C++, entered the index at 192.

The top 10 rankings for the Tiobe index for August were:

1. Python, 15.42% share
2. C, 14.59%
3. Java, 12.4%
4. C++, 10.17%
5. C#, 5.59%
6. Visual Basic, 4.99%
7. JavaScript, 2.33%
8. Assembly, 2.17%
9. SQL, 1.7%
10. PHP, 1.39%

In the alternative Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index, which assesses language popularity based on Google searches of programming language tutorials, the top 10 rankings for August were:

1. Python, 28.11% share
2. Java, 17.35%
3. JavaScript, 9.48%
4. C#, 7.08%
5. C/C++, 6.19%
6. PHP, 5.47%
7. R, 4.35%
8. TypeScript, 2.79%
9. Swift, 2.09%
10. Objective-C, 2.03%