For those unaware, TIOBE Programming Community Index is calculated every month and the ratings are based on the number of search engine queries, which contain the name of the programming language as a keyword in popular search engines such as Google, Bing, and Wikipedia. In August 2017, C had slipped to its lowest-ever rating (6.477 percent). Since then, C has clawed back and climbed back up to 11.07 percent this month. “Surprise, surprise, oldtimer language C appears to be the fastest grower of 2017 in the TIOBE index and thus is declared programming language of the year. The C language gained 1.69 [percent] in 2017. Usually this is not sufficient to become language of the year, so C has actually won because there were no outstanding alternatives,” the index stated. According to the TIOBE Programming Community Index, C was the most popular programming language from 2012 to 2015. However, C started struggling to compete in the web and mobile development world that resulted in the steady decline of the language’s popularity. “Despite all this, it is remarkable to see that C is getting more popular after a steep downward trend that started at the end of 2015. C had a rating of more than 17 [percent] at that time and lost more than 10 [percent] after that in the next 18 months. A possible reason for this revival is that C is very popular in the growing manufacturing and machine industry (including the automotive market),” according to the index. Even though Java dropped 3.05 percent compared to January 2017, Java (14.215 percent) still remains at the top of the programming language ranking. While C remains unchanged at rank 2 in the programming language ranking, Python and Erlang were just behind with an index gain of 1.21 and 0.98 percent, respectively. Other most interesting improvements of the year in the TIOBE index were the programming languages R, which jumped from rank 16 to 8, Erlang (from 44 to 23) and Kotlin (from 89 to 39). However, promising programming languages such as Julia, Hack, Kotlin or Rust were not able to make it to the top 20 or even the top 30. “Becoming part of the top 10 or even the top 20 requires a large ecosystem of communities and evangelists including conferences,” said Paul Jansen, TIOBE managing director and compiler of the index. “This is not something that can be developed in one year’s time.” The top 10 on the TIOBE index for the month of January are Java (14.215 percent), C (11.037 percent), C++ (5.603 percent), Python (4.678 percent), C# (3.754 percent), JavaScript (3.465 percent), Visual Basic .Net (3.261 percent), R (2.549 percent), PHP (2.532 percent) and Perl (2.419 percent). Last year, Google’s Go language (Golang) was awarded the TIOBE Programming Language of the Year for 2016.
