C++ wins programming language of the year award

The vaunted C++ programming language, which overtook Java last month in the monthly Tiobe Index of language popularity, was the index’s biggest gainer in 2022, Tiobe announced this week.

C++ popularity grew by 4.62 percentage points year over year, enough to earn the Tiobe Programming Language of the Year 2022 award. The Tiobe index gauges language popularity using a formula that assesses searches on programming languages in Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and other search engines.

Runners-up for this year’s award include C, which grew by 3.82 percentage points, and Python, which rose 2.78 percentage points in 2022. Python was the Tiobe Programming Language of the Year for 2021.

Tiobe, which offers software quality services, attributed C++ popularity to excellent performance while being a high-level, object-oriented language. Developers can build fast, vast software systems, with more than 1 million lines of code, without necessarily ending up in a “maintenance nightmare,” Tiobe said. Also helping C++ popularity was the publication of new language standards with interesting features, such as C++ 11 and C++ 20.

Also in 2022, the Tiobe index saw gains by Rust, Lua, F#, Kotlin, Julia, and Dart. The top 10 languages in Tiobe’s index for January 2023 were as follows:

1. Python, with a rating of 16.36%
2. C, 16.26%
3. C++, 12.91%
4. Java, 12.21%
5. C#, 5.73%
6. Visual Basic, 4.64%
7. JavaScript, 2.87%
8. SQL, 2.5%
9. Assembly language, 1.6%
10. PHP, 1.39%

The alternative Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index, which analyzes how often language tutorials are searched in Google, listed the following top 10 languages for January 2023:

1. Python, with a 27.93% share
2. Java, 16.78%
3. JavaScript, 9.63%
4. C#, 6.99%
5. C/C++, 6.9%
6. PHP, 5.29%
7. R, 4.03%
8. TypeScript, 2.79%
9. Swift, 2.23%
10. Objective-C, 2.2%