Python Stays #1, R Rises in Popularity, Says TIOBE

Are statistical programmers coalescing around a handful of popular languages? That's the question asked by the CEO of software assessment site TIOBE, which every month estimates the popularity of programming languages based on their frequency in search results: This month, the programming language R matched its all-time high by reaching position #8 in the TIOBE index once again. This is not a coincidence. The statistical programming language market is clearly undergoing a major consolidation. The biggest winners are Python and R, while many long-established alternatives continue to lose momentum. The era in which the statistical computing landscape was fragmented across many niche languages and platforms appears to be coming to an end.

Several established players are steadily declining:

— MATLAB is close to dropping out of the TIOBE top 20.

— SAS is about to leave the top 30 for the first time since the TIOBE index began.

— Wolfram/Mathematica remains well below its historical peak and is losing further ground.

— SPSS dropped out of the top 100 last month....


Elsewhere in the index, Java and C++ swapped positions this month. Java gained momentum following the successful release of Java 26. Another notable riser is Zig, which is approaching the TIOBE top 30 for the first time. Zig's growing popularity appears to be driven by its rare combination of low-level performance, straightforward tooling, and relative ease of use compared to traditional systems programming languages.
Their estimate for the most popular programming languages in May:

1. Python
2. C
3. Java
4. C++
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. Visual Basic
8. R
9. SQL
10. Delphi/Object Pascal

The five next most popular languages on their rankings are Fortran, Scratch, Perl, PHP, and then Rust at #15. Rust is up for positions from May of 2025 — while Go has dropped to #16, seven ranks lower than its May 2025 position of #7.

Delphi

[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

Who is using this in 2026?

Re:

[jdagius]

... Who is using this in 2026? ...

Kids who grew up using Turbo Pascal?

Re:

[Moridineas]

That's amazing. I used Delphi in the 1990s at about the same time as, IIRC, Visual Basic 4.0. I enjoyed it at the time, and Object Pascal was a pretty reasonable language, but outside of maintaining legacy apps, I don't really get it. I'm surprised to see both it and Visual Basic so high on the list.

I guess I'm also surprised to see C at #2. Maybe because of Linux?

Re:

[angel'o'sphere]

With Free Pascal you can compiler for all majour platforms.
No idea however how the GUI library looks like.

I prefer Dart, it is more C++ - ish :D

Commercial programming languages are disappearing

[SoftwareArtist]

MATLAB, SAS, Mathematica, and SPSS are all commercial products. The long term trend is that all the proprietary programming languages are disappearing. Everything in the top ten is either strictly open source, or at least has an open source implementation available.

What is SQL doing on the list? Everything else is a general purpose procedural language, and then they added in one domain specific query language? If they're going to do that, why not also include HTML, CSS, XML, ...? I bet HTML would be in

Re:

[backslashdot]

Good. People should ween themselves off those.

Re:

[Charlotte]

Good. People should ween themselves off those.

Not to mention that some of them are truly awful. SPSS makes me shudder.

Re:

[cellocgw]

MATLAB, SAS, Mathematica, and SPSS are all commercial products. ... Everything in the top ten is either strictly open source, or at least has an open source implementation available.

FWIW Octave is a pretty decent open-source doppelganger for MATLAB.

Visual Basic #7

[fredrated]

Gotta love it!

Re:

[sodul]

Probably because spreadsheets are easily abused as databases and VB used to be the simplest way to automatically query the data in a spreadsheet to generate fancy graphs. There are plenty of much better modern ways to do these things of course but old habits are hard to kill.