Which languages are most popular is an easy question without an easy answer. In this article, we present a response to it.
The first problem to answer the question is where to gather the information. For the purpose of this article, we used 6 different sources, TIOBE, StackOverflow, RedMonk, Github, Statista, and PYPL.
The other problem is that each ranking is based on different criteria and approaches, which creates differences between them. Some are done with surveys, others analyze public data, and others combine other indexes. Below is an explanation of how each source makes the ranking.
Even with differences, there is a relative coincidence between the most popular ones, but in some cases, C and C++ are grouped as one thing, while in others are presented as two separate languages.
JavaScript includes multiple frameworks such as Angular, React, Node, Vue, or Ember, even in practice developers work with just one framework.
To make the rank we make an average between the six mentioned sources, to get the following result:
1 – JavaSCript
2 – Python
3 – Java
4 – C++
5 – C#
6 – PHP
7 – C
8 – Go
9 – TypeScript
10 – Ruby
11 – Swift
12 – Rust
Source rank details
| TIOBE | StackOverflow | Red Monk | Github | Statista | PYPL | |
| JS | 7 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| Python | 1 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 1 |
| Java | 4 | 6 | 3 | 2 | 5 | 2 |
| C++ | 3 | 10 | 7 | 4 | 8 | 5 |
| C# | 5 | 7 | 5 | 10 | 7 | 4 |
| TypeScript | 5 | 8 | 6 | 5 | 8 | |
| PHP | 10 | 9 | 4 | 7 | 9 | 6 |
| C | 2 | 11 | 10 | 9 | 10 | 5 |
| Go | 11 | 13 | 15 | 5 | 12 | 11 |
| Ruby | 16 | 16 | 9 | 8 | 16 | 15 |
| Swift | 15 | 18 | 11 | 16 | 18 | 9 |
| Rust | 20 | 15 | 19 | 14 | 13 | 12 |
Source methodology
TIOBE:
The name stands for “The Importance Of Being Earnest” and is an organization specialized in assessing and tracking the quality of software.
The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of web pages with the language name. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings.
StackOverflow:
Stack Overflow is an organization that helps people find the answers they need when they need them. They have a public Q&A platform that over 100 million people visit every month to ask questions, learn, and share technical knowledge.
The ranking is based on a survey of 73,268 software developers from 180 countries around the world. This is the number of responses they consider “qualified” for analytical purposes based on time spent on the full, completed survey.
RedMonk:
RedMonk is a developer-focused industry analyst firm.
RedMonk creates the ranking by extracting language rankings from GitHub and Stack Overflow and combining them for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction. The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.
GitHub:
GitHub is the largest code host in the world, with more than 100 million users, and more than 330 million repositories.
By analyzing how languages are used in GitHub it’s possible to understand the popularity of programming languages among developers and to discover the unique characteristics of each language. The ranking table shows the top languages, considering pull requests, pushes, stars, or issues in relation to each language
Statista:
Statista is a leading provider of market and consumer data.
Ranking results are based on an online survey with 71,547 respondents.
PYPL:
PYPL name stands for PopularitY of Programming Language.
PYPL Index is created by analyzing how often language tutorials are searched on Google. The more a language tutorial is searched, the more popular the language is assumed to be. It is a leading indicator. The raw data comes from Google Trends.