In this month of July 2021, the TIOBE index celebrates its 20th anniversary. It was in July 2001 that it published for the first time the ranking of the most used programming languages. 20 years ago, Java dominated this ranking by far, followed by C and C++. Python was then in seventh position, far behind.
Python aims for the top, PHP rises, and TypeScript takes off
Next are C++, C#, and Visual Basic, which are all down except for C++, which continues to follow Python closely with a nice 1.80% increase. In seventh place, JavaScript tries painfully to climb back up the rankings with an increase of 0.23%. As you may have noticed, PHP used by giants like Facebook or WordPress, does not appear in this top 7. For the simple reason that it occupies the 8th place. This is rather promising for this ever so popular language which was in 9th place in 2020.
In conclusion, Python has been gaining ground in the last few months and could quickly consider taking the top spot in this ranking. Python is particularly widespread in the scientific world, and has many optimized libraries for numerical computation. This language is also considered a good entry point into the world of web development for beginners to understand the logic of programming.
We can also notice an interesting change on the TypeScript side, which moves from the 45th position to the 37th. TypeScript is a strict syntax superset of JavaScript that was created by Microsoft. Its purpose is to improve and secure the production of JavaScript code. Many developers who are comfortable with JavaScript are gradually switching to TypeScript.