C# language snags Tiobe language of the year honors

As expected, Microsoft’s C# language has won the Tiobe programming language of the year award for 2023, with the largest uptick in popularity year over year, at 1.43 percentage points.

C#, an object-oriented language for building .NET applications, wins the award for the first time, Tiobe announced on January 6. The Tiobe Programming Community Index itself dates back to 2001.

Tiobe’s index gauges language popularity based on the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses, and third-party vendors, which are calculated using searches in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Wikipedia.

C# has been a top 10 programming language for more than two decades, and is catching up to the “big four” languages Python, C, C++, and Java, Tiobe said. Runners up for the largest gain in share were Scratch (0.83%) and Fortran (0.64%). “C# is eating market share from Java and is getting more and popular in domains such as web application back ends and games,” Tiobe said.

Apart from C#, the Tiobe index last year had Fortran and Kotlin become permanent top 20 players, replacing R and Perl. Fortran is viewed as fit to crunch numbers while Kotlin is viewed as a competitor to Java. Languages viewed as possibilities to enter the Tiobe top 20 in 2024 include Dart and TypeScript.

The Tiobe top 10 for January 2024:

1. Python, with a 13.97% rating
2. C, 11.44%
3. C++, 9.96%
4. Java, 7.87%
5. C#, 7.16%
6. JavaScript, 2.77%
7. PHP, 1.79%
8. Visual Basic, 1.6%
9. SQL, 1.46%
10. Scratch, 1.44%

The alternative Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index analyzes how often language tutorials are searched on in Google. The Pypl top 10 for January 2024:

1. Python, with a 28.2% share
2. Java, 15.73%
3. JavaScript, 8.91%
4. C/C++, 6.8%
5. C#, 6.67%
6. R, 4.59%
7. PHP, 4.54%
8. TypeScript, 2.92%
9. Swift, 2.77%
10. Objective-C, 2.34%