Microsoft’s fast-growing language for .NET may be poised to overtake Java in popularity for the first time, Tiobe said. Credit: Lukas Gojda / Shutterstock C#, Microsoft’s object-oriented, cross-platform, open source language for the .NET platform, has become the fastest-growing language on Tiobe’s monthly index of programming language popularity. C# may eventually surpass Java in popularity, Tiobe surmised. In the latest Tiobe Programming Community index, published November 10, C# was rated at 7.65%, an increase of 2.67 percentage points from a year ago. With its high growth rate, C# could become Tiobe’s language of the year for 2025, a designation given to the language with the highest ratings increase during the. C# won this award for the year 2023. “How did C# achieve this? Java and C# are battling for a long time in the same areas,” said Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen, in a bulletin accompanying this month’s index. “Right now it seems like C# has removed every reason why not to use C# instead of Java: it is cross-platform nowadays, it is open source, and it contains all new language features a developer wants. While the financial world is still dominated by Java, all other terrains show equal shares between Java and C#,” Jansen wrote. Furthermore, Microsoft is going strong and C# is still Microsoft’s most-backed programming language, Jansen noted. C# has never rated higher than Java in the Tiobe index. But currently, the difference between the two is less than one percentage point, with Java ranked fourth with an 8.54% rating. Until recently, no language could beat the growth figures of Python, but Python seems to have plateaued, Jansen said. Python leads the Tiobe index with a 23.37% rating this month. Software quality services company Tiobe bases its ratings on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses, and third-party vendors for each language. Tiobe uses popular websites including Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Bing, and more than 20 others to calculate the ratings. The Tiobe index top 10 for November 2025: Python, 23.37% C, 9.68% C++, 8.95% Java, 8.54% C#, 7.65% JavaScript, 3.42% Visual Basic, 3.31% Delphi/Object Pascal, 2.06% Perl, 1.84% SQL, 1.8% The Go language, which ranked eighth last month, slipped to 11th place in Tiobe’s November index, with a rating of 1.72%. Go had a rating of 1.92% last month. The alternative Pypl Popularity of Programming Language Index assesses language popularity based on how often language tutorials are searched on in Google. The Pypl index top 10 for November 2025: Python, 27.3% Java, 12.47% C/C++, 11.5% Objective-C, 9.65% R, 5.7% JavaScript, 5.6% C#, 3.62% Swift, 3.41`% PHP, 3.04% Rust, 2.62% C#JavaProgramming LanguagesPythonSoftware Development