TIOBE Index for March 2025
March Headline: The dinosaurs strike back
It is interesting to see that very old languages are sneaking into the TIOBE index top 20. Fortran and Delphi are competing for a top 10 position, whereas COBOL and this month's new entry Ada are a little bit further down the list. All of them show an uptrend. Why is this? Why aren't the new and promising languages shining instead?
I think that it has to do with the many vital legacy systems that keep the world running. Most of them are developed with the aid of these dinosaur languages. Now that the last of the core developers of these systems are about to retire, companies avoid any risk and choose to keep the existing systems and even extend them rather than replacing them by newer systems based on more modern languages. Note that we name these languages dinosaurs, but they have evolved over time and are pretty up to date. All of them have new language definitions. Check out Fortran 2023, Delphi 12 (released in 2024), Ada 2023 and COBOL 2023. We might frown to see these languages being in the TIOBE index top 20, but they definitely serve a purpose and deserve credit.
The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular web sites Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Bing and more than 20 others are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.
| Mar 2025 | Mar 2024 | Change | Programming Language | Ratings | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  | Python | 23.85% | +8.22% | |
| 2 | 3 |  |  | C++ | 11.08% | +0.37% |
| 3 | 4 | |  | Java | 10.36% | +1.41% |
| 4 | 2 |  |  | C | 9.53% | -1.64% |
| 5 | 5 |  | C# | 4.87% | -2.67% | |
| 6 | 6 |  | JavaScript | 3.46% | +0.08% | |
| 7 | 8 | |  | Go | 2.78% | +1.22% |
| 8 | 7 | |  | SQL | 2.57% | +0.65% |
| 9 | 10 | |  | Visual Basic | 2.52% | +1.09% |
| 10 | 15 |  |  | Delphi/Object Pascal | 2.15% | +0.94% |
| 11 | 14 | |  | Fortran | 1.70% | +0.48% |
| 12 | 9 | |  | Scratch | 1.66% | +0.21% |
| 13 | 12 | |  | PHP | 1.48% | +0.16% |
| 14 | 17 | |  | Rust | 1.23% | +0.20% |
| 15 | 13 | |  | MATLAB | 0.98% | -0.26% |
| 16 | 21 | |  | R | 0.94% | +0.13% |
| 17 | 11 |  |  | Assembly language | 0.87% | -0.52% |
| 18 | 24 | |  | Ada | 0.85% | +0.10% |
| 19 | 19 |  | Kotlin | 0.85% | -0.11% | |
| 20 | 20 |  | COBOL | 0.84% | +0.01% | |
Other programming languages
The complete top 50 of programming languages is listed below. This overview is published unofficially, because it could be the case that we missed a language. If you have the impression there is a programming language lacking, please notify us at tpci@tiobe.com. Please also check the overview of all programming languages that we monitor.
| Position | Programming Language | Ratings |
|---|---|---|
| 21 | Ruby | 0.83% |
| 22 | Prolog | 0.78% |
| 23 | Lisp | 0.77% |
| 24 | Perl | 0.70% |
| 25 | Classic Visual Basic | 0.69% |
| 26 | Swift | 0.61% |
| 27 | SAS | 0.57% |
| 28 | Scala | 0.53% |
| 29 | (Visual) FoxPro | 0.51% |
| 30 | Dart | 0.46% |
| 31 | Haskell | 0.44% |
| 32 | VBScript | 0.41% |
| 33 | Lua | 0.39% |
| 34 | Julia | 0.36% |
| 35 | Objective-C | 0.34% |
| 36 | GAMS | 0.28% |
| 37 | TypeScript | 0.24% |
| 38 | Transact-SQL | 0.23% |
| 39 | ABAP | 0.19% |
| 40 | PL/SQL | 0.19% |
| 41 | Solidity | 0.19% |
| 42 | PowerShell | 0.16% |
| 43 | D | 0.16% |
| 44 | Bash | 0.16% |
| 45 | RPG | 0.15% |
| 46 | ML | 0.15% |
| 47 | X++ | 0.14% |
| 48 | Elixir | 0.14% |
| 49 | Awk | 0.13% |
| 50 | Zig | 0.13% |
The Next 50 Programming Languages
The following list of languages denotes #51 to #100. Since the differences are relatively small, the programming languages are only listed (in alphabetical order).
- ActionScript, Algol, Alice, Apex, APL, CFML, CHILL, Clipper, CLIPS, Clojure, Curl, Eiffel, Elm, Erlang, F#, Forth, Groovy, Hack, Icon, Inform, Io, J, JScript, LabVIEW, Ladder Logic, Logo, Maple, Modula-2, Mojo, MQL5, NATURAL, Nim, OCaml, Occam, OpenCL, OpenEdge ABL, PL/I, Q, Raku, Ring, S, Scheme, Simulink, Smalltalk, SPARK, Tcl, Vala/Genie, VHDL, Wolfram, Xojo
Very Long Term History
To see the bigger picture, please find below the positions of the top 10 programming languages of many years back. Please note that these are average positions for a period of 12 months.
| Programming Language | 2025 | 2020 | 2015 | 2010 | 2005 | 2000 | 1995 | 1990 | 1985 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Python | 1 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 24 | 23 | - | - |
| C++ | 2 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 13 |
| C | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Java | 4 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 3 | - | - | - |
| C# | 5 | 5 | 5 | 6 | 9 | 10 | - | - | - |
| JavaScript | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 7 | - | - | - |
| Go | 7 | 15 | 36 | 184 | - | - | - | - | - |
| Visual Basic | 8 | 18 | 234 | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| SQL | 9 | 9 | - | - | 100 | - | - | - | - |
| Fortran | 10 | 30 | 31 | 24 | 15 | 18 | 5 | 3 | 12 |
| PHP | 13 | 8 | 6 | 3 | 5 | 27 | - | - | - |
| Ada | 24 | 36 | 30 | 27 | 16 | 17 | 7 | 6 | 3 |
| Lisp | 27 | 31 | 19 | 16 | 14 | 9 | 6 | 5 | 2 |
| Objective-C | 34 | 10 | 3 | 21 | 39 | - | - | - | - |
| (Visual) Basic | - | - | 100 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 7 | 4 |
There are 2 important remarks here:
- There is a difference between "Visual Basic" and "(Visual) Basic" in the table above. Until 2010, "(Visual) Basic" referred to all possible dialects of Basic, including Visual Basic. After some discussion, it has been decided to split "(Visual) Basic" into all its dialects such as Visual Basic .NET, Classic Visual Basic, PureBasic, and Small Basic, just to name a few. Since Visual Basic .NET has become the major implementation of Visual Basic, it is now called "Visual Basic".
- The programming language SQL was added to the TIOBE index in 2018 after somebody pointed out that SQL is Turing Complete. So although this language is very old, it has only a short history in the index.
Programming Language Hall of Fame
The hall of fame listing all "Programming Language of the Year" award winners is shown below. The award is given to the programming language that has the highest rise in ratings in a year.
| Year | Winner |
|---|---|
| 2024 |  Python |
| 2023 | C# |
| 2022 | C++ |
| 2021 | Python |
| 2020 | Python |
| 2019 | C |
| 2018 | Python |
| 2017 | C |
| 2016 | Go |
| 2015 | Java |
| 2014 | JavaScript |
| 2013 | Transact-SQL |
| 2012 | Objective-C |
| 2011 | Objective-C |
| 2010 | Python |
| 2009 | Go |
| 2008 | C |
| 2007 | Python |
| 2006 | Ruby |
| 2005 | Java |
| 2004 | PHP |
| 2003 | C++ |
Bugs & Change Requests
This is the top 5 of most requested changes and bugs. If you have any suggestions how to improve the index don’t hesitate to send an e-mail to tpci@tiobe.com.
- Apart from “<language> programming”, also other queries such as “programming with <language>”, “<language> development” and “<language> coding” should be tried out.
- Add queries for other natural languages (apart from English). The idea is to start with the Chinese search engine Baidu. This has been implemented partially and will be completed the next few months.
- Add a list of all search term requests that have been rejected. This is to minimize the number of recurring mails about Rails, JQuery, JSP, etc.
- Start a TIOBE index for databases, software configuration management systems and application frameworks.
- Some search engines allow to query pages that have been added last year. The TIOBE index should only track those recently added pages.
Yes, the only condition is to refer to its original source “www.tiobe.com”.
If a language meets the criteria of being listed (i.e. it is Turing complete and has an own Wikipedia entry that indicates that it concerns a programming language) and it is sufficiently popular (more than 5,000 hits for +”<language> programming” for Google), then please write an e-mail to tpci@tiobe.com.
We spent a lot of effort to obtain all the data and keep the TIOBE index up to date. In order to compensate a bit for this, we ask a fee of 5,000 US$ for the complete data set. The data set runs from June 2001 till today. It started with 25 languages back in 2001, and now measures more than 150 languages once a month. The data are available in comma separated format. Please contact sales@tiobe.com for more information.
Well, you can do it either way and both are wrong. If you take the sum, then you get the intersection twice. If you take the max, then you miss the difference. Which one to choose? Suppose somebody comes up with a new search term that is 10% of the original. If you take the max, nothing changes. If you take the sum then the ratings will rise 10%. So taking the sum will be an incentive for some to come up with all kinds of obscure terms for a language. That’s why we decided to take the max.
The proper way to solve this is is of course to take the sum and subtract the intersection. This will give rise to an explosion of extra queries that must be performed. Suppose a language has a grouping of 15 terms, then you have to perform 32,768 queries (all combinations of intersections). So this seems not possible either… If somebody has a solution for this, please let us know.