Programming languages: Python rules as Java declines Posted on : Dec 04 - 2020

Python continues to shake Java from its spot as one of the top programming languages.

A year ago Java was the most popular programming language among developers, but it's now jostling for second place with  Python. 

Software firm Tiobe's December 2020 programming language rankings place C as the most popular language, followed by Java, Python, C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, PHP, R, and SQL.

Python is back in third place after Tiobe's November 2020 search engine-based rankings put Python ahead of Java for the first time in the past 20 years.

The exact order of the rankings should probably be taken with a grain of salt given the variations between months in Tiobe's rankings. However, the language index has consistently tracked a decline in Java's popularity as a language.

This month Java declined by 4.72 percentage points compared to its rating a year ago while Python was up by 1.9 percentage points.

In December, Tiobe nominates a language of the year and the company's chief, Paul Jansen, reckons 35 year-old Python is a shoo-in.

"The programming language that got the highest increase in ratings in one year time will win this title. Python is far ahead with a positive delta of +1.90% at the moment. Runner ups are C++ (+0.71%), R (+0.60%) and Groovy (+0.69%). Chances are very low that any language will come close to Python this last month of the year," noted Jansen.

It will be the fourth time Python has become the language of the year. Python has become popular for data science and machine learning thanks in part to its ecosystem of data-science libraries like NumPy and SciPy.  View More