Why Python Became the 2018 TIOBE Programming Language of the Year
In 2018 the TIOBE index crowned Python as the top programming language, highlighting its rapid 3.62% rise and dominance across academia, AI, scripting, web development, and scientific computing, while also showing notable shifts for other languages such as Kotlin, Rust, and TypeScript.
Global programming‑language popularity site TIOBE announced that Python was the 2018 Programming Language of the Year.
In 2018 Python rose by 3.62%, outpacing Visual Basic .NET (+3.20%) and Java (+2.69%). It is now the most taught language in universities and ranks first in statistics, AI programming, scripting, system testing, web development, and scientific computing.
Python last received this honor in 2010.
Other notable movements include:
MATLAB – from rank 18 to 11
Kotlin – from rank 39 to 31
Rust – from rank 46 to 33
Julia – from rank 47 to 37
TypeScript – from rank 167 to 49
Ruby – from rank 11 down to 18
Erlang – from rank 23 down to 50
F# – from rank 40 down to 64
Alice – from rank 26 down to 66
TIOBE predicts Kotlin could quickly rise into the top 20 by 2019.
TOP 10 programming languages TIOBE index trend (2002‑2018):
Ranks 21‑50 are shown below:
Ranks 51‑100 (listed alphabetically due to small value differences): (Visual) FoxPro, ABC, ActionScript, Alice, AutoLISP, BBC BASIC, bc, Bourne shell, C shell, CL (OS/400), CoffeeScript, Common Lisp, Crystal, cT, Elixir, F#, Forth, Hack, Icon, Inform, Io, J, Korn shell, LiveCode, Maple, Mercury, ML, Modula‑2, Monkey, MOO, MQL4, MS‑DOS batch, NATURAL, OCaml, Occam, OpenCL, OpenEdge ABL, Oz, PostScript, Q, Ring, RPG, S, Solidity, SPARK, Standard ML, Tcl, Vala/Genie, VBScript, VHDL.
The TIOBE Programming Community Index measures language popularity monthly, based on the number of engineers, courses, and third‑party vendors, using search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, and Baidu. Detailed methodology is available at https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/ .
The TIOBE index does not judge language quality; developers can use it to assess whether to update their skills or choose a language for new software projects.
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