While updating the readings by Tiobe for January 2024 (rang 12, the eleventh month in a row Fortran is listed among the top 20), I notice Jansen’s comment to review 2023 (emphases added):
For the first time in the history of the TIOBE index, C# has won the programming language of the year award. Congratulations! C# has been a top 10 player for more than 2 decades and now that it is catching up with the big 4 languages, it won the well-deserved award by being the language with the biggest uptick in one year (+1.43%). Runners up are Scratch (+0.83%) and Fortran (+0.64%). C# is eating market share from Java and is getting more and more popular in domains such as web application back ends and games (thanks to Unity). C# can be used free of charge and evolves in a steady pace, making the language more expressive every new release. C# is here to stay and might even surpass Java soon.
Apart from C#, there were a lot of interesting changes in the TIOBE index last year. Fortran and Kotlin became permanent top 20 players replacing old-time favorites R and Perl. Fortran is very fit to crunch numbers with good libraries and remains a university favorite in lots of domains. Kotlin is the easy to learn/write competitor of Java. Interesting question: what languages will enter the TIOBE index top 20 in 2024? This is very hard to predict. Julia touched the TIOBE index briefly in 2023, but couldn’t keep that position.* Maturity of the Julia language and community is needed to get a second chance. […]
The violin plot below can illustrate a little the evolution with readings available (each dot one record of entry 86), a doodle by a snippet of R obtained with ChatGTP:
* In the present reading for January 2024, ranked at position 28.