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Home »TIOBE Index
Python is currently the most popular programming language worldwide, maintaining a lead of more than 10 percentage points over its closest competitors. In absolute terms, Python reached its peak popularity in July 2025 with a market share of 26.98%. Although it continues to dominate, its share has since declined to 21.81% this month.
This shift suggests that several more specialized languages are gradually gaining ground at Python’s expense, most notably R and Perl. R, a statistical programming language, has long been a direct competitor to Python in the field of data science. While Python clearly overtook R in recent years, R appears to be regaining momentum and has re-entered the TIOBE Index top 10 for several consecutive months.
On the scripting side, Perl has also returned to prominence. Once the undisputed leader in scripting, Perl declined after years of internal fragmentation and competition from newer languages. Recently, however, it has staged a comeback, reclaiming a position in the TIOBE top 10 since January 2018.
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 skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular web sitesGoogle, Amazon, Wikipedia, Bing and more than 20 others are used to calculate the ratings.It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about thebest programming language or the languagein whichmost lines of code have been written.
The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be foundhere.
| Feb 2026 | Feb 2025 | Change | Programming Language | Ratings | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  | Python | 21.81% | -2.08% | |
| 2 | 4 |  |  | C | 11.05% | +1.22% |
| 3 | 2 |  |  | C++ | 8.55% | -2.82% |
| 4 | 3 | |  | Java | 8.12% | -2.54% |
| 5 | 5 |  | C# | 6.83% | +2.71% | |
| 6 | 6 |  | JavaScript | 2.92% | -0.85% | |
| 7 | 10 | |  | Visual Basic | 2.85% | +0.81% |
| 8 | 15 |  |  | R | 2.19% | +1.14% |
| 9 | 7 | |  | SQL | 1.93% | -0.93% |
| 10 | 9 | |  | Delphi/Object Pascal | 1.88% | -0.29% |
| 11 | 30 | |  | Perl | 1.67% | +1.19% |
| 12 | 11 | |  | Fortran | 1.64% | -0.12% |
| 13 | 14 | |  | PHP | 1.34% | +0.20% |
| 14 | 13 | |  | Rust | 1.32% | -0.14% |
| 15 | 12 | |  | Scratch | 1.30% | -0.25% |
| 16 | 8 |  |  | Go | 1.23% | -1.03% |
| 17 | 24 | |  | Ada | 1.14% | +0.43% |
| 18 | 16 | |  | MATLAB | 1.13% | +0.14% |
| 19 | 17 | |  | Assembly language | 1.10% | +0.15% |
| 20 | 23 | |  | Kotlin | 1.05% | +0.29% |
The complete top 50 of programming languages is listed below. This overview is published unofficially, because it could be the case that we missed a language. Ifyou have the impression there is a programming language lacking, please notify us attpci@tiobe.com. Please also check theoverview of all programming languages that we monitor.
| Position | Programming Language | Ratings |
|---|---|---|
| 21 | Swift | 1.02% |
| 22 | COBOL | 0.76% |
| 23 | Classic Visual Basic | 0.74% |
| 24 | Prolog | 0.72% |
| 25 | Ruby | 0.71% |
| 26 | Dart | 0.61% |
| 27 | Lua | 0.60% |
| 28 | SAS | 0.57% |
| 29 | Julia | 0.54% |
| 30 | Lisp | 0.49% |
| 31 | Objective-C | 0.48% |
| 32 | TypeScript | 0.47% |
| 33 | PL/SQL | 0.45% |
| 34 | VBScript | 0.39% |
| 35 | Haskell | 0.31% |
| 36 | Erlang | 0.29% |
| 37 | Ladder Logic | 0.28% |
| 38 | (Visual) FoxPro | 0.28% |
| 39 | Scala | 0.27% |
| 40 | LabVIEW | 0.27% |
| 41 | PowerShell | 0.26% |
| 42 | Transact-SQL | 0.23% |
| 43 | X++ | 0.22% |
| 44 | ABAP | 0.21% |
| 45 | Elixir | 0.19% |
| 46 | Zig | 0.19% |
| 47 | ActionScript | 0.18% |
| 48 | D | 0.17% |
| 49 | Logo | 0.17% |
| 50 | PL/I | 0.17% |
The following list of languages denotes #51 to #100. Since the differences are relatively small, the programming languages are only listed (in alphabeticalorder).
To see the bigger picture, please find below the positions of the top 10 programming languages of many years back. Please note that these areaverage positions for a period of 12 months.
| Programming Language | 2026 | 2021 | 2016 | 2011 | 2006 | 2001 | 1996 | 1991 | 1986 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Python | 1 | 3 | 5 | 7 | 8 | 27 | 16 | - | - |
| C++ | 2 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 9 |
| C | 3 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Java | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 31 | - | - |
| C# | 5 | 5 | 4 | 5 | 7 | 11 | - | - | - |
| JavaScript | 6 | 8 | 7 | 11 | 10 | 8 | 33 | - | - |
| Visual Basic | 7 | 7 | 11 | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Delphi/Object Pascal | 8 | 189 | 12 | 10 | 9 | - | - | - | - |
| Go | 9 | 12 | 61 | 17 | - | - | - | - | - |
| SQL | 10 | 11 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Ada | 15 | 35 | 26 | 23 | 16 | 18 | 7 | 10 | 3 |
| Lisp | 26 | 31 | 27 | 14 | 14 | 20 | 6 | 3 | 2 |
| (Visual) Basic | - | - | - | 6 | 6 | 3 | 3 | 5 | 4 |
Important observations:
The hall of fame listing all "Programming Language of the Year" award winners is shown below. The award is given to the programming language that has the highest rise in ratings in a year.
| Year | Winner |
|---|---|
| 2024 |  Python |
| 2023 | C# |
| 2022 | C++ |
| 2021 | Python |
| 2020 | Python |
| 2019 | C |
| 2018 | Python |
| 2017 | C |
| 2016 | Go |
| 2015 | Java |
| 2014 | JavaScript |
| 2013 | Transact-SQL |
| 2012 | Objective-C |
| 2011 | Objective-C |
| 2010 | Python |
| 2009 | Go |
| 2008 | C |
| 2007 | Python |
| 2006 | Ruby |
| 2005 | Java |
| 2004 | PHP |
| 2003 | C++ |
This is the top 5 of most requested changes and bugs. If you have any suggestions how to improve the index don’t hesitate to send an e-mail to tpci@tiobe.com.
Yes, the only condition is to refer to its original source “www.tiobe.com”.
If a language meets the criteria of being listed (i.e. it is Turing complete and has an own Wikipedia entry that indicates that it concerns a programming language) and it is sufficiently popular (more than 5,000 hits for +”<language> programming” for Google), then please write an e-mail to tpci@tiobe.com.
We spent a lot of effort to obtain all the data and keep the TIOBE index up to date. In order to compensate a bit for this, we ask a fee of 5,000 US$ for the complete data set. The data set runs from June 2001 till today. It started with 25 languages back in 2001, and now measures more than 150 languages once a month. The data are available in comma separated format. Please contact sales@tiobe.com for more information.
Well, you can do it either way and both are wrong. If you take the sum, then you get the intersection twice. If you take the max, then you miss the difference. Which one to choose? Suppose somebody comes up with a new search term that is 10% of the original. If you take the max, nothing changes. If you take the sum then the ratings will rise 10%. So taking the sum will be an incentive for some to come up with all kinds of obscure terms for a language. That’s why we decided to take the max.
The proper way to solve this is is of course to take the sum and subtract the intersection. This will give rise to an explosion of extra queries that must be performed. Suppose a language has a grouping of 15 terms, then you have to perform 32,768 queries (all combinations of intersections). So this seems not possible either… If somebody has a solution for this, please let us know.
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