Most popular programming languages in the world

8 January 2018

Java, C, and C++ remain the most popular programming languages in the world, according to the Tiobe Index for January 2018.

C was also awarded Language of the Year 2017 by Tiobe due to its growth of 1.69% in 2017.

Runner-ups for the fastest-growing languages of 2017 were Python and Erlang, which saw year-over-year growth of 1.21% and 0.98% respectively.

Tiobe stated that the growth of C could be attributed to its popularity in the manufacturing and machine industry.

The PYPL rankings showed Java at the top of the list, followed by Python and PHP.

The top 10 programming languages for January 2018, according to the Tiobe Index and PYPL rankings, are detailed below.

January 2018
Tiobe Ranking Change YoY PYPL Ranking Change YoY
Java -3.06% Java -1.4%
C +1.69% Python +4.9%
C++ -0.70% PHP -1.7%
Python +1.21% JavaScript +0.1%
C# -0.29% C# -1.0%
JavaScript +0.62% C++ -0.7%
Visual Basic .NET +0.30% C -0.8%
R +0.76% R +0.6%
PHP -0.03% Objective-C -0.7%
Perl -0.33% Swift +0.2%

Calculating the rankings

PYPL – The more a language tutorial is searched, the more popular the language is assumed to be. The raw data comes from Google Trends.

Tiobe – The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses, and third-party vendors. Popular search engines are also used to calculate the ratings.

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