The TIOBE Software Company has published its September ranking of programming languages. The release is notable for the significant rise in the popularity of the Perl language, which climbed from 27th to 10th place in the ranking over the year. In February, the popularity index for Perl was 0.49%, after which it started rising to 0.7% in March, 0.9% in April, 1.2% in May, 1.47% in June, 1.76% in July, and reached 2.08% in August.
The reasons for the rise in Perl's popularity are unclear; no significant events related to this language, apart from the annual release of Perl 5.42, occurred this year. TIOBE's director suggests that the high ranking is linked to the large number of Perl books sold on Amazon (for example, the number of Perl books is four times higher than for PHP and seven times higher than for Rust). The increasing frequency of intermediate releases of Perl 5 and the overshadowing of Perl 6/Raku (Perl 6 ranks 129th) are also mentioned. Other hypotheses include a resurgence of interest in Perl due to its text processing capabilities and advanced regular expressions, which have become relevant with the development of AI platforms.
Among other rising languages, C has gained popularity, climbing to 3rd place compared to September last year, pushing Java down to 4th. Additionally, Pascal moved up from 11th to 9th place, R from 15th to 13th, Ada from 26th to 14th, and Assembler from 21st to 17th. Python and C++ continue to hold the 1st and 2nd positions, respectively. In addition to Java, popularity has declined for SQL (from 9th to 11th), Fortran (10th to 12th), PHP (13th to 15th), Rust (14th to 18th), Matlab (12th to 19th), and Kotlin (18th to 20th).
The TIOBE popularity index draws its conclusions based on the analysis of search query statistics from systems such as Google, Bing, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, and Baidu.
In the September PYPL ranking, which uses Google Trends, C/C++ languages have pushed JavaScript from 3rd to 4th place over the year, while Objective-C's popularity has risen to 4th, Ada's by three positions, and Ruby, Lua, Julia, and Pascal by two. Perl has climbed from 28th to 27th place, while Rust moved from 10th to 9th place. Groovy's popularity has decreased by four positions, VBA and TypeScript by three, and Kotlin, Dart, and Scala by two.
In 2025, the RedMonk ranking was updated, based on popularity assessments on GitHub and discussion activity on Stack Overflow. The top twenty leaders are as follows (compared to last year, CSS dropped one position while C++ rose): 1 JavaScript 2 Python 3 Java 4 PHP 5 C# 6 TypeScript 7 C++ 8 CSS 9 Ruby 10 C 11 Swift 12 Go 12 R 14 Shell 14 Kotlin 14 Scala 17 Objective-C 18 PowerShell 19 Rust 20 Dart
The IEEE Spectrum ranking for 2025 has not yet been updated. The IEEE Spectrum ranking is prepared by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and considers a combination of 12 metrics obtained from 10 different sources (the method is based on the assessment of search results for the query "{language_name} programming", analysis of mentions on Twitter, the number of new and active repositories on GitHub, the number of questions on Stack Overflow, publications on Reddit and Hacker News, job listings on CareerBuilder and EEE Job Site, mentions in digital archives of journal articles and conference papers). The popularity distribution from last year is as follows:
Source: opennet.ru
