What Do RedMonk’s Q3 2024 Rankings Reveal About the Rise and Fall of Programming Languages?

RedMonk's 2024 Q3 programming language ranking has been released, showing a largely stable top‑20 where JavaScript, Python and Java remain the three leading languages.

Below is the chart provided by RedMonk:

After the top three, PHP ranks fourth, C# fifth, and Microsoft’s TypeScript comes in sixth.

"Technically, TypeScript hasn’t changed; it stayed at sixth in our last ranking, but this quarter it uniquely topped the list. Meanwhile CSS dropped to seventh and TypeScript sits just outside the top five. Whether it will keep growing or has peaked is interesting to watch," said Stephen O'Grady, RedMonk’s co‑founder and chief analyst.

C++ and CSS share seventh place, Ruby is ninth, C is tenth, Swift eleventh, and Go ties with R at twelfth.

Shell, Kotlin and Scala each occupy the fourteenth position, with Kotlin and Scala (both JVM languages) moving up three and two spots respectively.

Objective‑C fell to a historic low of seventeenth, likely remaining only for legacy maintenance.

Rust and Dart are tied at nineteenth, unchanged for five quarters.

Beyond the top‑20, RedMonk also highlighted emerging languages: Ballerina (61st), Bicep (78th), Zig (87th), Grain and Moonbit.

Bicep, a DSL for Azure resource deployment, and Grain and Moonbit, WebAssembly‑optimized languages, are noted, while Zig follows the paths of C++ and Rust.

"Grain and Moonbit haven’t entered the top 100 yet, but Bicep jumped eight spots to 78, and Zig rose ten spots to 87," O'Grady added. "Compared with Ballerina, the progress is modest; Ballerina surged from 80 to 61 this quarter, placing it on our watch list of potential up‑and‑coming languages."

For the full ranking details, visit RedMonk’s report .