- April 2025: rank #11, rating 2.04%
- May 2025: rank #11, rating 1.78%
Good stability for one year, with ranking oscillating between #8 and #11. Fortran is above the ground noise.
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For reference:
Indeed, in the past year it has consistently been above 1.5%, so higher than anytime before.
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Not to argue with an in-depth analysis that looks well grounded, but why would legacy applications grow so much in popularity over the past several years and counting? I’d like to propose an alternate explanation, if my personal experience is shared by at least a few other programmers. It looks to me that all those newfangled languages created since 2009 onward have largely failed to live up to the hype, and when disappointed developers turn to classics like Fortran (but also Ada and/or Object Pascal) they find that:
- Those have in fact kept up with the times.
- They’re actually full of good ideas that lay forgotten for decades.
- Curly braces may be overrated.
I ended up not using Fortran after all 'cause it didn’t fit my needs, but clearly a lot of other people have uses for it, and they can’t all be graybeards sticking to what they’ve learned decades ago.
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I do not think there was an in-depth analysis into the reasons here. (If there was, I’d really like to see more information). It’s been my experience that the popularity of languages like Fortran is explained away with “legacy code” by those who internalised the myth that it’s outdated and no one uses it anymore. The same people likely won’t be aware of any recent developments that correlate with the rise in popularity (Fortran-lang projects included). Then, when prompted to explain the popularity of those languages, they default back to the same answer, because they have no other.
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Python has become the most popular language, and it does not use curly braces for loops and if blocks. For someone used to Python syntax, Fortran should be more comfortable than the curly brace languages. Quoting Tiobe,
Python’s popularity increased with another whopping 2.2% last month to 25.35% in total. This 25.35% is the highest share a programming language ever had in the history of the TIOBE index, except for Java in June 2001 (which was the first month of the TIOBE index with much fewer languages being tracked) and October 2001. Python also broke another record: it is the first time a language has such a big lead over the rest, i.e. more than 15% difference if compared to number 2 C++. The only reason other languages still have a reason for existing is because of Python’s low performance, and the fact that it is interpreted and thus prone to unexpected run-time errors.
The last sentence is amusing. Performance and not failing at run-time are important, as is the ability to reason about code, aided by type declarations.
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After making two releases of a specific Python project with show-stopping bugs in them, I added type declarations and started using mypy in earnest. But the worst thing about that claim is that monocultures are a recipe for disaster, pure and simple. That, and in what language do they propose to implement a Python interpreter for bootstrapping? Assembly?
PyPy is a Python interpreter which is on average 3 times faster than CPython. From Wikipedia,
The PyPy interpreter itself is written in a restricted subset of Python called RPython (Restricted Python). RPython puts some constraints on the Python language such that a variable’s type can be inferred at compile time.
Still leaves you the bootstrapping problem. 
When Pascal was bootstrapped, Wirth writes:
The task of writing the compiler was assigned to a single graduate student (E. Marmier) in 1969. As his programming experience was restricted to Fortran, the compiler was to be expressed in Fortran, with its translation into Pascal and subsequent self-compilation planned after its completion. This, as it turned out, was another grave mistake. The inadequacy of Fortran to express the complex data structures of a compiler caused the program to become contorted and its translation amounted to a redesign, because the structures inherent in the problem had become invisible in the Fortran formulation.
Source: Recollections about the Development of Pascal – Pascal for small machines
Would be fun to try it again now that Fortran has derived types and recursion.
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Back to the Top 10:
- June 2025: rank #10, rating 1.86%
But the strange thing in that June index is the surge of Ada, now at rank #11. Its rating was 0.85% in March and is now 1.7%. Not a new standard effect, as Ada 2022 was approved in 2023. 
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Probably just a noisy sample!
Users of Ada and PL/I and COBOL are often surprised as much to find out there is still a Fortran community as Fortran users are to find out they exist. Of course, they are probably not as surprised as Julia and Python users are to find out any of them exist.
That has been going on for a while with Lisp, and Pascal, APL, Java, and so on. It is hard not to smile when about every five years I see new employees who are positive the language they learned is the last one needed and all the others should go away. The bigger the programs were written in a language the more resistant it is to fading away gracefully :>
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The rating is falling:
Some interesting thoughts of the editor Paul Jansen in July:
July Headline: Senior programming languages battling for a top 10 position
The first 7 languages of the TIOBE index have been the same for the last couple of years. This can’t be said about the languages at positions 8 to 12. They change positions every month. It is a continuous battle between the golden oldies: Visual Basic, SQL, Fortran, Ada, Perl, and Delphi. And every time you think one of them will stay in the top 10, it is replaced by another language. And more remarkably, other new languages are expected to enter the top 10 instead of these seniors. Where are Rust, Kotlin, Dart, and Julia? Apparently, established languages are hot. But which one will win? Honestly, this is very hard to tell, but I would put my bets on Ada. With the ever-stronger demands on security, Ada is, as a system programming language in the safety-critical domain, likely the best survivor.
And in August:
[…] Why would you start to learn a new obscure language for which no AI assistance is available? This is the modern way of saying that you don’t want to learn a new language that is hardly documented and/or has too few libraries that can help you.
September is about the new surge of Perl in the index (#10).
Well, to some this statement can be misunderstood. Thanks to updating record 86 of this thread yesterday, I still remember Tiobe’s rank 10 about Perl in September 2025 refers to Perl 5, while by the same set of metrics «Perl 6/Raku is at position 129 of the TIOBE index, thus playing no role at all in the programming world. Perl 5 on the other hand is releasing more often recently, thus gaining attention.» (loc. cit.) At present, Tiobe monitors 282 languages/groups.
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I find the Tiobe index an interesting metrics, once you are aware of its limitations.
However I find that the comments of the editor are often a bit ungrounded, and that they demonstrate an approximate understanding of the languages.
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The editor’s comments do sound a bit dramatising and confusing to me.
Apparently, established languages are hot. But which one will win?
Is it really that unexpected that established languages are popular? (The C’s also remain popular). Why should there be one winner? There’s nothing magical about the top 10. They all are “winners” if they remain popular, even if they’re not in the top 10. But perhaps the sports-and-games style commentary is the point.
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Python 3, incompatible with Python 2, is the most popular language, but Perl 6/Raku is unpopular. Is the lesson that when a language (such as Fortran) is not in the top tier of popularity, breaking backward compatibility is too risky?
Of course, that winner story means nothing, except in the TIOBE Index game
It’s probably risky.
But Python 3 came in 2008, and Python’s popularity was then similar to Perl’s (both in my memories and in the TIOBE Index). It was very long for people to adopt Python 3, but at least Python 3 did exist. In the case of Perl, the 6th version (Raku) came a very very long time after being announced (2000=>2015).
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