Why Is R Language Surging to the Top of the TIOBE Rankings in July 2020?

In July 2020 the TIOBE Programming Language Index released its monthly ranking, revealing notable shifts in the popularity of programming languages worldwide.

R, a language for statistical analysis, experienced a rapid rise, climbing to the 8th position—only behind JavaScript and Visual Basic. The TIOBE founder attributed this surge to the growing use of statistical languages in universities and industry, especially as developers need extensive data‑mining capabilities for COVID‑19 vaccine research, making the easy‑to‑learn R increasingly popular.

Other significant movements include C overtaking Java to reclaim the top spot, while Java, which had dominated for over five years, fell to second place. Swift entered the top ten, swapping places with SQL, and Rust entered the top‑20 for the first time, moving up to rank 18, ahead of the educational language Scratch.

R is primarily used for statistical analysis, plotting, and data mining, and its performance in matrix calculations rivals GNU Octave and MATLAB. Open‑source tools such as Python, NumPy, and SciPy can also replace many MATLAB functions, especially since the U.S. has restricted MATLAB use in some Chinese institutions.

Despite its rise, R does not appear on GitHub’s trending language list. Since 2014, JavaScript has consistently topped GitHub’s language rankings, followed by Python, Java, PHP, C#, C++, Shell, C, and Ruby.

Additional observations: PL/SQL and Classic Visual Basic are sliding toward the top‑20 danger zone; Objective‑C fell out of the top‑20 to rank 23; Delphi/Object Pascal dropped from 22 to 30. SAS, another statistical language, advanced to rank 21, and Kotlin moved up from 30 to 27.

The TIOBE Index measures programming language popularity based on the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third‑party vendors worldwide, using search engine results from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, and Baidu. The exact calculation method is documented on the TIOBE website.

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/

While the index does not assess language quality, developers can use it to gauge whether they need to update their skill set or to inform language choices when starting new software projects.