What’s Driving the Rise of Python? November 2019 Programming Language Rankings Revealed

PYPL (PopularitY of Programming Language) November 2019 rankings have been released.

Programming language rankings are always controversial. The author uses a "Journey to the West" analogy to remind readers to keep a calm perspective on such lists, noting that top‑10 rankings are relatively stable in the short term.

Below are the summarized November rankings.

PYPL

PYPL is created by analyzing the frequency of Google searches for language tutorials. More searches indicate higher popularity; the data originates from Google Trends.

Thus, higher search frequency for a language or IDE suggests greater popularity, helping developers decide which language or database to learn or use in new projects.

November 2019 programming language list:

The bottom two positions swapped compared to September, but the top‑20 languages changed little. The top five remain Python, Java, JavaScript, C# and PHP.

Python continues its strong growth, holding over 30% of Google search share. JavaScript made a slight gain of 0.1%, while other languages show a declining trend.

PHP’s popularity cooled fastest, with the largest drop in search volume.

Beyond the top ten, rankings stay stable but competition is fierce. Kotlin stands out with a month‑over‑month increase, and TypeScript, Go, and Rust also show upward trends.

TypeScript, now at rank 11 with a 1.87% share, matches Matlab’s share; it may break into the top ten next month.

The top two positions are Python (29.49%) and Java (19.57%). Java’s long‑term popularity change is modest but shows a recent decline, while Python has been gaining momentum, overtaking Java around April last year.

Java’s share has fallen below 20%, widening the gap with Python, indicating growing interest in learning Python.

Full November programming language list: http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html

TIOBE

In 2004, Perl was still in the top eight, but due to Python’s advantage and the split between Perl 5 and Perl 6, Perl disappeared. Objective‑C entered the top eight in 2014, later replaced by Swift as iPhone app development shifted.

The TIOBE top‑8 has remained unchanged over the years. Trends are slow, but Python is becoming the mainstream language supporting PHP, Perl, etc. Newer languages still have work to enter the top‑20, with candidates like Dart, Scala, Lua, Rust, Kotlin and TypeScript.

Database Rankings

Here are this year’s database system rankings.

Author: Qingfeng

Related reads:

2019 September Database System Rankings and Trends

Python Will Release a Major Version Every Year

Google’s Python Coding Standards