Google programming languages made two notable moves in the TIOBE index between January and February 2024: Go reached #8 (its highest position in these rankings) and Carbon entered the top 100. The Programming Community Index TIOBE shows year-over-year trends in Programming Languages based on search engine volume.
Go shines at 8th place in TIOBE's Programming Community Index
“Thanks to its growing adoption in the industry, Go appears to be a language that has the ability to remain in the top 10 of the TIOBE index for a long time,” wrote TIOBE Software CEO Paul Jansen in the TIOBE index publication of February.
Go launched in November 2009, just a few years after the release of the suite of software packaged as Google Workspace, which includes Gmail and Google Docs. It won the TIOBE award for language of the year 2009, indicating that it gained the most popularity throughout the year. Go gradually dropped to the 122nd position in 2015. In 2015, it began an aggressive half-year release cycle and slowly returned to prominence.
“With each new release, Go got better,” Jansen wrote. “In parallel, Docker and Kubernetes (both written in Go) started to become very popular starting in 2016. This helped restore trust in Go.”
Go is used widely, particularly for back-end programming, web services, and APIs.
“It has the same low learning curve [as Python], but it is easier to distribute (also across platforms),” Jansen told TechRepublic in an email. “It's faster and more scalable.”
SEE: Python Crash Course (TechRepublic Academy)
Carbon enters the top 100 of the TIOBE programming community index
The experimental open source language Carbon entered the TIOBE top 100 for the first time. Carbon is a very young programming language developed by Google engineer Chandler Carruth in 2022. He developed Carbon to work with existing C++ code and C++ build systems. Carbon is intended to provide the benefits of C++ while adding simpler syntax, a modern generic system, and modular code organization. Carbon is often used for back-end programming, web services, and APIs.
Jansen told TechRepublic that it's notable that it took Carbon “so long” to crack the top 100.
“Google's other language, Go, entered the top 20 of the TIOBE index two months after its birth. Carbon is now over a year and a half old and things are changing faster today,” he stated. “So if it had really been a success, it should have already been close to the top 10 instead of being in the top 100.”
TIOBE trends from February 2023 to February 2024
As of February 2024, the top three programming languages are Python, C, and C++. However, they all lost popularity throughout 2023 in TIOBE's proprietary ranking system. Other important changes between February 2023 and February 2024 are:
- C# had the highest year-over-year growth at +1.15%.
- JavaScript gained popularity from seventh to sixth place.
- SQL gained popularity from eighth to seventh place.
- Visual Basic fell from 6th to 9th place.
- Fortran rose dramatically from 24th to 11th place.
