C takes Tiobe Index language of the year honors

The stalwart C programming language has upset trendy Python to snag “language of the year” honors for 2019 in the Tiobe Index of language popularity.

Python had been expected to take the designation for 2019 just as it it did for 2018. But C won, thanks to a 2.4 percentage-points increase in its overall rating year over year. Runners-up were C# (2.1 percent), Python (1.4 percent), and Swift (0.6 percent).

Driving C’s resurgence is its use in programming for small devices in the Internet of Things. Also, C is easy to learn and a C compiler is available for every processor, Tiobe said.

Tiobe’s ratings are based on a formula assessing searches of programming languages on popular search engines such as Google, Bing, and Wikipedia. Overall, for the month of January, Tiobe’s top 10 programming languages were as follows:

1. Java, with a rating of 16.896 percent
2. C, 15.773 percent
3. Python, 9.704 percent
4. C++, 5.574 percent
5. C#, 5.349 percent
6. Visual Basic .NET, 5.287 percent
7. JavaScript, 2.451 percent
8. PHP, 2.405 percent
9. Swift, 1.795 percent
10. SQL, 1.504 percent

The rival PyPL (Popularity of Programming Language) Index, which is based on an analysis of how often language tutorials are searched on in Google, listed the following languages in its top 10 for January 2020:

1. Python, 29.72 percent
2. Java, 19.03 percent
3. JavaScript, 8.2 percent
4. C#, 7.28 percent
5. PHP, 6.09 percent
6. C/C++, 5.91 percent
7. R, 3.72 percent
8. Objective-C, 2.47 percent
9. Swift, 2.36 percent
10. Matlab, 1.79 percent