Python Stays #1, R Rises in Popularity, Says TIOBE (tiobe.com) 33
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:
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:
- Python
- C
- Java
- C++
- C#
- JavaScript
- Visual Basic
- R
- SQL
- 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 (Score:2)
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... Who is using this in 2026? ...
Kids who grew up using Turbo Pascal?
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Probably people with an existing codebase to maintain.
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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?
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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
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I'm surprised to see both it and Visual Basic so high on the list.
What they call "Visual Basic" is VB.NET. "Classic Visual Basic" is #21.
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I enjoyed it at the time, and Object Pascal was a pretty reasonable language, but outside of maintaining legacy apps,
I'm guessing it's a lot of legacy apps. My friend worked with PowerBuilder heavily in the 1990s doing a lot of custom work for niche vertical markets, like municipal water utility billing applications and industrial monitoring systems. I think a lot of that stuff is still floating around, and, similar to mainframe applications, organizations don't want to pay to overhaul the whole thing in Java/Rust/Python/whatever is fashionable at the moment.
Re: Delphi (Score:2)
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The other Ps (PHP and Python) kind of eroded Perl's base I'd imagine. Then if you learned VBasic you could use it for quick GUI prototyping and simple scripting and probably won't move to the other Visual languages.
VB is still probably taught in enough entry level programming classes that I assume you have more of an influx of people googling answers as well. This isn't "real world" data, but search results which will skew a bit towards what newer programmers might need to look up.
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There are still a few cases where Delphi/Lazarus/OP is a solid choice, like native desktop applications and lightweight and high performance microservices.
In my previous job we used Delphi to make a set of multi-language, multi-platform libraries for electronic tax documentation.
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I would have loved to have specialized in Delphi/Lazarus. The web convolutificated UI coding. I miss the days of focusing on domain issues instead of ever-changing buggy layer-filled tooling. DOM sucks the big one. Where's that DeLorean when I need it?...
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Well to be fair, this survey measures the number of people asking questions related to a language. And anybody who is still using Delphi, will definitely have a hard time getting questions answered. So maybe they're just more verbose.
Commercial programming languages are disappearing (Score:5, Interesting)
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 the top five if they included it.
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Good. People should ween themselves off those.
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Good. People should ween themselves off those.
Not to mention that some of them are truly awful. SPSS makes me shudder.
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SPSS makes me shudder
SPSS seems to have given up. You can run Python and R scripts from within SPSS now. After doing that for a few cycles, it is obvious that SPSS is not necessary and the free solution is much better.
On top of that, IBM (who now owns SPSS) keeps upping the price and putting more features as "premium," trying to squeeze the last drop of profit out of a dead product line.
Re:Commercial programming languages are disappeari (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Commercial programming languages are disappeari (Score:4, Informative)
R is a domain specific language as well - just it's really good for statistics.
The reason SQL is on the list is it's popular and complete. And of what you mention, CSS is Turing-complete and there's many demos of it, including an x86 emulator that can be run completely without JavaScript, or can run a bit more efficiently with it (mostly to provide the clock). (It just needs HTML because Chromium based browsers can't load CSS without it. Firefox can, though).
Python, R and such are big in statistics and math. And both are popular because AI.
If you're looking at the next big web based infection vector, CSS might be one to look out for since not even NoScript will block CSS by default. (It's just arcane).
And for those looking - the x86 CSS emulator is at https://github.com/rebane2001/... [github.com]
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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?
It is kinda weird. On top of it not being a programming language, does any DB professional really use stock ANSI SQL? Doesn't every database have its own, unique extensions (PL/SQL maybe being the most famous example)?
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SQL is probably being taught more than the HTML stack in programming / college classes, and this list is based on search results. I imagine any older language that look "odd" like that are because it is being taught to newer programmers who are searching for answers, while anything new is a little inflated as experienced programmers might need to look up references.
Re:Commercial programming languages are disappeari (Score:4, Interesting)
I relied upon Mathematica / Wolfram Language heavily for a couple of decades, was an active member of the community of sophisticated users, and had my own work reported on and reprinted by Wolfram themselves in their official blog. About two years ago I decided to shift to Python. It's a much less elegant language and I'm nowhere near as productive in it, but the shift may have nonetheless been the single most important decision I have made in my career. Within a year I had abandoned elegant code, swiftly written but useless to anybody but me, and was able to solve problems in my firm's existing codebase. The impact for me, and for my firm, has been significant and entirely positive.
I keep a Mathematica license but only to solve math problems. I may never write another line in Wolfram Language.
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I seem to have had a very similar progression. I still tend to think in "/." replacement operators, but it's been perhaps 15 years since I've really used Wolfram Language.
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R is domain-specific.
Visual Basic #7 (Score:4, Interesting)
Gotta love it!
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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.
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I miss the instant gratification of those desktop IDE's. It's hard to unsee it as dev tooling grows more bloated and indirect over time.
Maybe Cherokee Nation Will Return. Nobody has mathematically proven the bloat must be in there. I suspect it's resume buzzword crack. YAGNI still means something. Every "desktop IDE's can't do X" claim I've encountered has been debunked. (Not claiming they have it, only that the Laws of the Universe don't forbid it.)
what search results? (Score:3)
Does asking an AI for some code qualify as a search result?
For great justice! (Score:2)
Launch every Zig!
Link dead (Score:3)
The link to the original article is dead.
TIOBE == Search stats (Score:3)
Instead of claiming "popularity" it would be more accurate to claim "languages n00blets are struggling with"
CFML Makes the List! (Score:2)
I've been using ColdFusion for almost 30 years, I was curious to see if it was still on this list, and it's there! #50.
I've been using this dying language forever, because I wanted the functionality, not the popularity. I never cared how many people were using it, I just cared if it could do what I needed.
I have been waiting for something that fundamentally changes things. PHP, VB.Net, C#, etc. weren't really big moves forward, because they were just going to generate HTML, just like ColdFusion.
Now I am