TIOBE has just published its list of most popular programming languages for the month of January 2021, and at the same time has proclaimed Python the winner of the programming language of the year 2020.
The award is awarded to programming language that gained the most popularity all year according to the methods that the index uses to calculate it. TIOBE is quite a famous and somewhat quirky index, one that has been around for almost 20 years.
This is the fourth time in the history of the index that Python has won this award, setting a record. The language jumped 2.01% in popularity during 2020, closely followed by C ++ with an increase of 1.99%, and C with 1.66%.
In fact, in the year we just left behind, Python surpassed Java as the most popular programming language according to TIOBE for the first time in its history, although only for that month. By January 2021, C is back in the lead, followed by Java, and Python comes in third.
Other interesting data are the uploads of languages such as R that have gone from position 18 to 9. And the language Julia that is emerging as a candidate to occupy the top 20 in 2021, climbing more than two dozen positions in the last 12 months. Dart and Rust They're competing too, but even though they've touched the top 20 before, they haven't been there long.
TIOBE bases its measurements on the number of websites indexed by most search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo !, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, and Baidu) that refer to each language. It is considered doubtful and inaccurate by many, but it is also considered an interesting meter of how much a language is talked about on the web.