Why Scratch Leads the TIOBE Rankings: Surprising Insights from April 2020
The April 2020 TIOBE index reveals Scratch topping the list, rapid growth for SQL, Go, Swift and R, while Delphi drops out of the top 20, highlighting shifting trends in programming language popularity and the rising importance of visual coding for children.
TIOBE April 2020 Programming Language Ranking
TIOBE has released its programming language ranking for April 2020.
Scratch Takes the Spotlight
Scratch, a project from MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten team, uses a click‑and‑drag visual interface to teach children programming concepts, encouraging creative thinking, systematic reasoning, and collaboration.
According to the TIOBE CEO, more than 50 million projects have been created with Scratch, with about one million new projects added each month, underscoring its widespread popularity.
Rising Languages
Besides Scratch, languages such as SQL, Go, Swift and R show strong upward trends this month, with R breaking into the top 10.
Declining Languages
Delphi, previously seen as declining, has fallen out of the top 20, while Objective‑C, lacking Apple’s support, remains in the top 20 but shows a downward trend.
TIOBE Top 20 (April 2020)
Top 10 Language Index Trend (2002‑2020)
Ranks 21‑50
Ranks 51‑100
(Visual) FoxPro, ABC, ActionScript, Alice, Arc, ATLAS, Awk, bc, Bourne shell, C shell, CL (OS/400), Clojure, Common Lisp, Crystal, cT, Elixir, Forth, Hack, Icon, Inform, Io, J, Korn shell, Ladder Logic, LiveCode, Maple, Mercury, MQL4, NATURAL, Object Pascal, OCaml, OpenCL, OpenEdge ABL, Oz, PL/I, PostScript, Programming Without Coding Technology, Pure Data, Q, Red, Ring, S, Smalltalk, Solidity, SPARK, Tcl, Vala/Genie, Verilog, VHDL, Whitespace
About the TIOBE Index
The TIOBE Programming Community Index measures language popularity based on the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third‑party vendors worldwide. It aggregates data from major 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/ .
Note that the index does not assess language quality; developers can use it to gauge whether to update their skills or to inform language choices for new software projects.
Programmer DD
A tinkering programmer and author of "Spring Cloud Microservices in Action"
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