January Headline: C++ is TIOBE's Programming Language of the Year 2022!

C++ is TIOBE's programming language of the year 2022. It has won this title because C++ gained most popularity (+4.62%) in 2022. Runners up are C (+3.82%) and Python (+2.78%). Interestingly, C++ surpassed Java to become the number 3 of the TIOBE index in November 2022. The reason for C++'s popularity is its excellent performance while being a high level object-oriented language. Because of this, it is possible to develop fast and vast software systems (over millions of lines of code) in C++ without necessarily ending up in a maintenance nightmare.

Another reason for C++'s rise is its "recent" and constant publication of new language standards with interesting features. The first land mark was called C++11. Published in 2011, it was the first considerable change since 1998. The adoption of this new standard took a few years because there were no C++ compilers available to support the new language definition. Because of C++11, C++ was slowly going uphill in the TIOBE index after having been in a constant decline since 2001. The second land mark is the recent C++20 publication, which for instance introduced modules. It will probably lift C++ further in the TIOBE index for the next few years.

What else happened in 2022? Performance seemed to be important. C++ competitor Rust entered the top 20 again (being at position #26 one year ago), but this time it seems to be for real. Lua, which is known for its easy interfacing with C, jumped from position #30 to #24. F# is another language that made an interesting move: from position #74 to position #33 in one years' time. Promising languages such as Kotlin (from #29 to #25), Julia (from #28 to #29) and Dart (from #37 to #38) still have a long way to go before they reach the top 20. Let's see what happens in 2023. Happy New Year everybody! -- Paul Jansen CEO TIOBE Software.

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 search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most 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 found here.

Jan 2023	Jan 2022	Change	Programming Language		Ratings	Change
1	1			Python	16.36%	+2.78%
2	2			C	16.26%	+3.82%
3	4			C++	12.91%	+4.62%
4	3			Java	12.21%	+1.55%
5	5			C#	5.73%	+0.05%
6	6			Visual Basic	4.64%	-0.10%
7	7			JavaScript	2.87%	+0.78%
8	9			SQL	2.50%	+0.70%
9	8			Assembly language	1.60%	-0.25%
10	11			PHP	1.39%	-0.00%
11	10			Swift	1.20%	-0.21%
12	13			Go	1.14%	+0.10%
13	12			R	1.04%	-0.21%
14	15			Classic Visual Basic	0.98%	+0.01%
15	16			MATLAB	0.91%	-0.05%
16	18			Ruby	0.80%	-0.08%
17	14			Delphi/Object Pascal	0.73%	-0.27%
18	26			Rust	0.61%	+0.11%
19	20			Perl	0.59%	-0.12%
20	23			Scratch	0.58%	-0.01%

Other programming languages

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. If you have the impression there is a programming language lacking, please notify us at tpci@tiobe.com. Please also check the overview of all programming languages that we monitor.

The Next 50 Programming Languages

The following list of languages denotes #51 to #100. Since the differences are relatively small, the programming languages are only listed (in alphabetical order).

• ActionScript, Alice, Apex, B4X, bc, Bourne shell, C shell, Chapel, CL (OS/400), Clojure, Common Lisp, Crystal, cT, Elixir, Emacs Lisp, Erlang, Forth, GAMS, Hack, Icon, IDL, Inform, Io, J#, JScript, Korn shell, Ladder Logic, Limbo, LPC, ML, Modula-2, MQL5, NATURAL, OpenEdge ABL, PL/I, Pony, Processing, Programming Without Coding Technology, Q, Racket, Raku, Ring, S, Solidity, SPARK, Tcl, VBScript, VHDL, X++, Zig

Very Long Term History

To see the bigger picture, please find below the positions of the top 10 programming languages of many years back. Please note that these are average positions for a period of 12 months.

There are 2 important remarks here:

• There is a difference between "Visual Basic" and "(Visual) Basic" in the table above. Until 2010, "(Visual) Basic" referred to all possible dialects of Basic, including Visual Basic. After some discussion, it has been decided to split "(Visual) Basic" into all its dialects such as Visual Basic .NET, Classic Visual Basic, PureBasic, and Small Basic, just to name a few. Since Visual Basic .NET has become the major implementation of Visual Basic, it is now called "Visual Basic".

• The programming language SQL has not been in the TIOBE index for a long time. In 2018, somebody pointed out that SQL is Turing Complete. From that moment on, SQL is part of the TIOBE index. So although this language is very old, it has only a short history in the index.

Programming Language Hall of Fame

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
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++

Bugs & Change Requests

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.

1. Apart from “<language> programming”, also other queries such as “programming with <language>”, “<language> development” and “<language> coding” should be tried out.

2. Add queries for other natural languages (apart from English). The idea is to start with the Chinese search engine Baidu. This has been implemented partially and will be completed the next few months.

3. Add a list of all search term requests that have been rejected. This is to minimize the number of recurring mails about Rails, JQuery, JSP, etc.

4. Start a TIOBE index for databases, software configuration management systems and application frameworks.

5. Some search engines allow to query pages that have been added last year. The TIOBE index should only track those recently added pages.