C++ Still Shining in Language Popularity Index

C++, already established as a rising star in the Tiobe programming language popularity index, continues to make great strides so far in 2023.

The language scored an increase of 5.93% this month over the same time last year, far ahead of all other languages, software quality services vendor Tiobe said. In January, C++ won the Tiobe Programming Language of the Year designation for 2022, awarded to the language experiencing the most growth in Tiobe’s index. C++ is favored for developing applications requiring capabilities of the C language but for large software systems, Tiobe said. The founder of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup, recently cited uses ranging from aerospace to artificial intelligence/machine learning to biomedicine.

The Tiobe index bases language popularity on a formula assessing searches on languages in popular search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and Google, specifically monitoring the number of courses, skilled engineers, and third-party vendors pertinent to a language. The two new booming languages in the index’s Top 20 were Rust, positioned for safety and high performance and growing at 0.16% year over year, and Scratch, meant for beginners in elementary and secondary schools and growing at 0.13% year over year. Scratch was the 18th-ranked language and Rust was 20th this month. As far as established languages, C ranked second in the index and grew 1.3% year over year, while Java ranked fourth and grew 1.07% year over year in February. Visual Basic ranked sixth and grew 1.09%.

The Top 10 in Tiobe’s index for February 2023 are:

1. Python, with a rating of 15.49%
2. C, 15.39%
3. C++, 13.94%
4. Java, 13.21%
5. C#, 6.38%
6. Visual Basic, 4.14%
7. JavaScript, 2.52%
8. SQL, 2.12%
9. Assembly, 1.38%
10. PHP, 1.29%

The rival PYPL Popularity of Programming Language Index, which analyzes how often language tutorials are searched in Google, has the following as its top 10 for this month:

1. Python, 27.7% share
2. Java, 16.79%
3. JavaScript, 9.65%
4. C#, 6.97%
5. C/C++, 6.87%
6. PHP, 5.23%
7. R, 4.11%
8. TypeScript, 2.83%
9. Swift, 2.27%
10. Objective-C, 2.25%