Why MATLAB Fell Out of TIOBE’s Top 20 in August 2026

According to the TIOBE Programming Language Popularity Index released on August 8, 2026, MATLAB fell to rank 25, marking the first time in more than ten years that it has left the top 20. TIOBE CEO Paul Jensen warned that this could signal a temporary dip or the start of a longer‑term decline, stating, “MATLAB’s end may be near.”

The report attributes MATLAB’s slide to two main reasons. First, its proprietary license model puts it at a disadvantage in an era where most languages are freely available. Second, the language’s development pace lags behind newer or more actively evolved languages such as Python, C++, and Rust, which continuously adopt modern language features and programming paradigms.

TIOBE’s index measures language popularity by aggregating data on the number of skilled software engineers, related courses, and third‑party vendors. The calculation draws from over twenty popular sites, including Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Bing.

Top 10 languages in the August 2026 TIOBE ranking are:

Python – 18.53%

C – 11.10%

C++ – 8.62%

Java – 8.25%

C# – 4.09%

JavaScript – 2.63%

Visual Basic – 2.18%

SQL – 1.88%

R – 1.56%

Rust – 1.45%

Another well‑known ranking, the PYPL (PopularitY of Programming Language) index, uses Google search frequency to gauge popularity. Its August 2026 data are:

Python – 50.44% (yearly trend +20.2%)

Java – 12.8% (trend –2.0%)

C/C++ – 8.57% (trend –1.2%)

R – 4.18% (trend –1.3%, rank up)

JavaScript – 3.52% (trend –3.4%, rank down)

Objective‑C – 3.01% (trend +0.9%, rank up sharply)

PHP – 2.06% (trend –1.4%)

Rust – 1.86% (trend –1.0%, rank up)

C# – 1.74% (trend –3.0%, rank down sharply)

Swift – 1.68% (trend –1.2%, rank down)

Both rankings are intended as reference points and do not claim to reflect the intrinsic quality of a language or the amount of code written in it.