Will AI Mean Bring an End to Top Programming Language Rankings? (ieee.org) 33
IEEE Spectrum ranks the popularity of programming languages — but is there a problem? Programmers "are turning away from many of these public expressions of interest. Rather than page through a book or search a website like Stack Exchange for answers to their questions, they'll chat with an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT in a private conversation."
And with an AI assistant like Cursor helping to write code, the need to pose questions in the first place is significantly decreased. For example, across the total set of languages evaluated in the Top Programming Languages, the number of questions we saw posted per week on Stack Exchange in 2025 was just 22% of what it was in 2024...
However, an even more fundamental problem is looming in the wings... In the same way most developers today don't pay much attention to the instruction sets and other hardware idiosyncrasies of the CPUs that their code runs on, which language a program is vibe coded in ultimately becomes a minor detail... [T]he popularity of different computer languages could become as obscure a topic as the relative popularity of railway track gauges... But if an AI is soothing our irritations with today's languages, will any new ones ever reach the kind of critical mass needed to make an impact? Will the popularity of today's languages remain frozen in time?
That's ultimately the larger question. "how much abstraction and anti-foot-shooting structure will a sufficiently-advanced coding AI really need...?" [C]ould we get our AIs to go straight from prompt to an intermediate language that could be fed into the interpreter or compiler of our choice? Do we need high-level languages at all in that future? True, this would turn programs into inscrutable black boxes, but they could still be divided into modular testable units for sanity and quality checks. And instead of trying to read or maintain source code, programmers would just tweak their prompts and generate software afresh.
What's the role of the programmer in a future without source code? Architecture design and algorithm selection would remain vital skills... How should a piece of software be interfaced with a larger system? How should new hardware be exploited? In this scenario, computer science degrees, with their emphasis on fundamentals over the details of programming languages, rise in value over coding boot camps.
Will there be a Top Programming Language in 2026? Right now, programming is going through the biggest transformation since compilers broke onto the scene in the early 1950s. Even if the predictions that much of AI is a bubble about to burst come true, the thing about tech bubbles is that there's always some residual technology that survives. It's likely that using LLMs to write and assist with code is something that's going to stick. So we're going to be spending the next 12 months figuring out what popularity means in this new age, and what metrics might be useful to measure.
Having said that, IEEE Spectrum still ranks programming language popularity three ways — based on use among working programmers, demand from employers, and "trending" in the zeitgeist — using seven different metrics.
Their results? Among programmers, "we see that once again Python has the top spot, with the biggest change in the top five being JavaScript's drop from third place last year to sixth place this year. As JavaScript is often used to create web pages, and vibe coding is often used to create websites, this drop in the apparent popularity may be due to the effects of AI... In the 'Jobs' ranking, which looks exclusively at what skills employers are looking for, we see that Python has also taken 1st place, up from second place last year, though SQL expertise remains an incredibly valuable skill to have on your resume."
However, an even more fundamental problem is looming in the wings... In the same way most developers today don't pay much attention to the instruction sets and other hardware idiosyncrasies of the CPUs that their code runs on, which language a program is vibe coded in ultimately becomes a minor detail... [T]he popularity of different computer languages could become as obscure a topic as the relative popularity of railway track gauges... But if an AI is soothing our irritations with today's languages, will any new ones ever reach the kind of critical mass needed to make an impact? Will the popularity of today's languages remain frozen in time?
That's ultimately the larger question. "how much abstraction and anti-foot-shooting structure will a sufficiently-advanced coding AI really need...?" [C]ould we get our AIs to go straight from prompt to an intermediate language that could be fed into the interpreter or compiler of our choice? Do we need high-level languages at all in that future? True, this would turn programs into inscrutable black boxes, but they could still be divided into modular testable units for sanity and quality checks. And instead of trying to read or maintain source code, programmers would just tweak their prompts and generate software afresh.
What's the role of the programmer in a future without source code? Architecture design and algorithm selection would remain vital skills... How should a piece of software be interfaced with a larger system? How should new hardware be exploited? In this scenario, computer science degrees, with their emphasis on fundamentals over the details of programming languages, rise in value over coding boot camps.
Will there be a Top Programming Language in 2026? Right now, programming is going through the biggest transformation since compilers broke onto the scene in the early 1950s. Even if the predictions that much of AI is a bubble about to burst come true, the thing about tech bubbles is that there's always some residual technology that survives. It's likely that using LLMs to write and assist with code is something that's going to stick. So we're going to be spending the next 12 months figuring out what popularity means in this new age, and what metrics might be useful to measure.
Having said that, IEEE Spectrum still ranks programming language popularity three ways — based on use among working programmers, demand from employers, and "trending" in the zeitgeist — using seven different metrics.
Their results? Among programmers, "we see that once again Python has the top spot, with the biggest change in the top five being JavaScript's drop from third place last year to sixth place this year. As JavaScript is often used to create web pages, and vibe coding is often used to create websites, this drop in the apparent popularity may be due to the effects of AI... In the 'Jobs' ranking, which looks exclusively at what skills employers are looking for, we see that Python has also taken 1st place, up from second place last year, though SQL expertise remains an incredibly valuable skill to have on your resume."
AI Focusing on specific languages (Score:2)
I am seeing the same languages focused on over and over for LLMs: rust, golang, python, c++, bash, typescript, java
if these are the languages LLMs are universally best at, that's probably what people will continue to write things in, as LLMs work best at those. Claude and GPT5 are phenomenal at writing rust, python, golang, even terraform
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Claude and GPT5 are phenomenal at writing rust, python, golang, even terraform
"Phenomenal" in the sense of "phenomenally inefficient and unreliable", yes.
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Somebody clearly hasn't been paying attention since about April 2025. Things have changed dramatically.
I hope so (Score:2)
If it does it will be one of the many significant advances to our civilization it will make. Or already has made.
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i'm afraid you're overestimating the impact. decrement of language rankings slop will be more than offset by increment of other sorts of slop. the entropy of clickbait, slashvertisements and duplicates in closed slashdot systems can only ever increase. llm popularity rankings coming soon!
If we use AI generated code (Score:3)
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Re:If we use AI generated code (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, pretty much this. And in order to get halfway repeatable results we'll have to formalize the prompting language. It will just become the next rung on the high-level language ladder and will still require specialists (ie., programmers) to write it. Because English suuuuuuuuuuucks for any kind of formal description.
Not that I think it's really going to happen. I think coding via AI is going to be another fad that gets relegated to a niche position in the toolkit. Just like all the visual specification and programming languages that have been cropping up since before I started my career in the 1980s.
I think it's safe to say (Score:2)
If "AI" accomplishes that, it'd be universally considered a significant gain for humanity.
But, unfortunately, I think those imbecilic TIOBE rankings will keep getting posted to Slashdot ad infinitum. Even if AI wipes out humanity.
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Maybe AI will take over posting rankings after we're gone?
I can see it now, 2 AI agents in a pissing match where one claims Flugnarg is better because it used it to program the T2000 that wiped out 40,000,000 humans while the other AI agent claims the T2000 is a dumpster fire because it's written in Flugnarg and that the Z8000 it wrote in Nargflug is so much 733ter because it exterminated 40,000,000 humans 1 second faster than the T2000.
Personally, I think Flugnarg is more quantum stable than Nargflug, so i
SO AI (Score:2)
I prefer StackOverflow answers over AI responses to questions, because they are peer-reviewed and occasionally corrected or adjusted to specific conditions, and I know that someone actually tried the solution(s) provided instead of it being some amalgamation of various possible solutions.
Re:SO gt AI (Score:1)
meant the subject to be "SO > AI" ; ugh
Re: SO AI (Score:2)
Language Popularity studies were always bogus (Score:2)
What exactly do they measure? SLOC produced? Job Postings? GitHub commits? Articles in magazines? Job openings that mention the desired language(s)?
(For the latter, I remember a company using job postings in the LA Times, their local ppaper, as their "independent scientific" rationale for selecting their preferred programming language. I responded, "By that measure, shouldn't you be developing this system in HTML, since that's listed as a programming language in the job openings you surveyed?" Then I
Re: Language Popularity studies were always bogus (Score:2)
I've seen the same at MDA... (Space company). The language selection process had some requirements, pros cons, but in the end the selection was largely disconnected from all of those.
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What exactly do they measure? SLOC produced? Job Postings? GitHub commits? Articles in magazines? Job openings that mention the desired language(s)?
Consider this pathological problem. If someone invents a new programming language that is so intuitive and clear that anyone can program in that language without asking for help, and use of that language becomes widespread, then that language would still rank very low on the rankings based on the number of questions publicly asked about that language.
I would think these alternatives for rankings would be better. Do a survey of programmers. Do a census of code in open-source repositories. These ideas tar
Digression - I can't blame this on AI, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone else remember (and miss) when Slashdot summaries were, you know, SUMMARIES?
Take a look at the site's front page today, then compare it to how each submission looked in 2005 [archive.org] or in 2015 [archive.org]. Even in 2020 [archive.org], it wasn't too bad...
But now we routinely get long screeds - this current submission being a case in point - which typically contain most (or sometimes all!) of the article... AND which often is then padded out by copious additional rambling from the submitter.
Even today, when you submit a story, the submission form states that "[m]ost stories on Slashdot are less than 120 words; brevity is the soul of wit." So what gives?
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Certainly compared to you, I am new!
Of course not (Score:4, Funny)
Arguing about which language is best will never go away. It's too much fun.
On that note, C is obviously the immortal top language. *drops keyboard*
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A different related worry (Score:5, Insightful)
SQL drops (Score:2)
Prediction -- programming with SQL will be replaced by natural language prompts. And SQL's rank as a language will drop.
Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who wishes LLMs could code better, no, we are nowhere near there yet for anything non-trivial. The models vary, but when the number of distinct responsibilities hits ~20, the models start generating very poor logic. There's a reason why all the codegen tools have some central "toolkit" like Supabase. We are nowhere near the point where LLMs can take over all coding. I'd say for web dev tasks, they're getting close to 80% of the way there, but that last 20% is the hard parts and it will take 4x longer than the 80% easy-kill parts to take over. If you go down a few layers to performance-critical code, they're well under 30% of the way there. Another reason why this will not happen by 2026 is that coding is not the hardest part of software, figuring out what humans really want is.
Right now, LLMs can do a good amount of the low-value work that a good template or snippet library would cover. They're also decent at pinpointing bugs because they're very efficient spaghetti throwing machines, throwing entire boxes of noodles at the wall faster than humans. However, they're not very good at fixing bugs without causing regressions.
Want to see a model fall on its face? Ask any codegen tool to write you an inference engine for the H200 in PTX, you're not going to get very far. It output something that looks like PTX code, but it'll be, well, some novel form of pseudo-code that doesn't compile and is fundamentally broken.
Sure! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Who needs programming languages? We'll just need, er, some kind of ... um, agreed upon syntax ... to precisely specify our requirements and business logic to the LLMs ...
A useful aspect of tools like ChatGPT is that you don't have to specify everything precisely from the outset. You can initially give a rough description. The first draft might need adjusting, but you can iteratively request those adjustments until you get what you want.
It's particularly useful for small sections of code. If you are unfamiliar with the best grammar for performing a task in a given language, ChatGPT is normally a quicker option than trawling through the manuals.
A fun way of using it is to wri
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AI can't do that. (Score:5, Insightful)
AI straight up can't do the things that people are starting to claim it can do. Worse, it is entirely possible that AI will never be able to do the things that people are claiming it can already do. We're discouraging people from majoring in computer science based on the assumption that AI might one day replace them, when it isn't clear that this will ever happen at all.
All the evidence so far is that AI provides no productivity improvements, and actually slows programmers down compared to not using AI. Sure, it might one day in the distant future get better, and cars might one day drive a thousand miles on a gallon of gas. Or it might never get any better at all.
The cost of AI also isn't being taken into consideration. We're acting as if AI is free and programmers cost money, but AI is actually very expensive. Companies are losing billions of dollars on it just based on the assumption that they might one day make a profit somehow. If you take into account the cost in hardware, power, and engineering to train a model, in addition to the ongoing hardware, power, and engineering costs to run a model, AI could be way more expensive than programmers, and it can't even replace them.
So sure, make everyone avoid computer science, and triple all of our salaries when you can't find any programmers anymore. I'm down.
Betteridge says "no" (Score:3)
Betteridge's law of headlines [wikipedia.org]