People are getting attracted and very curious about coding. Unfortunately, choosing of programming language can be very difficult task because of scattered/lack of information available with us.
The simplified general guidelines for making a good decision to choose “your programming language” you need to understand what is “The Programming Index”.
The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up-to-date according to current market. It can be helpful to make a strategic decisions about what programming language should be adopted.
Measures of Programming Language!
There are plenty of resources available on internet which claims various different programming languages at different spots.
There could be n- numbers of parameter on which languages are being indexed, each subject to a different bias over what is measured, have been proposed.
Here are the few parameters –
- The number of times language name is appeared on web searches
- The simplicity of the language
- The number of programming jobs available at the moment
- The number of projects in that language on SourceForge, and GitHub
- The number of books sold that teach or describe the language
TIOBE (The Importance Of Being Earnest) Index
TIOBE Community Index
The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines. Search query that is used to calculate index:
+" programming"
PS- TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
There are 25 search engines like Google, Google Blogs, MSN, Yahoo, and Baidu etc. which are used to calculate the TIOBE index. The index is updated once a month.
There are 3 requirements that should all hold any language to qualify for TOBE Index.
TIOBE: Top 20 Programming Language
| Apr-2020 | Apr-2019 | Programming Language | Ratings | Change |
| 1 | 1 | Java | 16.73% | 1.69% |
| 2 | 2 | C | 16.72% | 2.64% |
| 3 | 4 | Python | 9.31% | 1.15% |
| 4 | 3 | C++ | 6.78% | -2.06% |
| 5 | 6 | C# | 4.74% | 1.23% |
| 6 | 5 | Visual Basic | 4.72% | -1.07% |
| 7 | 7 | JavaScript | 2.38% | -0.12% |
| 8 | 9 | PHP | 2.37% | 0.13% |
| 9 | 8 | SQL | 2.17% | -0.10% |
| 10 | 16 | R | 1.54% | 0.35% |
| 11 | 19 | Swift | 1.52% | 0.54% |
| 12 | 18 | Go | 1.36% | 0.35% |
| 13 | 13 | Ruby | 1.25% | -0.02% |
| 14 | 10 | Assembly language | 1.16% | -0.55% |
| 15 | 22 | PL/SQL | 1.05% | 0.26% |
| 16 | 14 | Perl | 0.97% | -0.30% |
| 17 | 11 | Objective-C | 0.94% | -0.57% |
| 18 | 12 | MATLAB | 0.93% | -0.36% |
| 19 | 17 | Classic Visual Basic | 0.83% | -0.23% |
| 20 | 27 | Scratch | 0.77% | 0.28% |
PYPL (PopularitY of Programming Language) Index
The PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language Index is created by analyzing how often language tutorials are searched on Google. The row data comes from the Google trends.
The PYPL Popularity of Programming Language index can help you decide which language to study, or which one to use in a new software project.
According to latest release note – worldwide, Python is the most popular language. Python grew the most in the last 5 years (14.3%).
PYPL: Top 28 Programming Language
Worldwide, Apr 2020 compared to a year ago:
| Rank | Language | Share | Trend |
| 1 | Python | 30.61% | 3.90% |
| 2 | Java | 18.45% | -1.90% |
| 3 | Javascript | 7.91% | -0.40% |
| 4 | C# | 7.27% | 0.00% |
| 5 | PHP | 6.07% | -1.10% |
| 6 | C/C++ | 5.76% | -0.20% |
| 7 | R | 3.80% | -0.20% |
| 8 | Objective-C | 2.40% | -0.40% |
| 9 | Swift | 2.23% | -0.20% |
| 10 | TypeScript | 1.85% | 0.20% |
| 11 | Matlab | 1.77% | -0.20% |
| 12 | Kotlin | 1.63% | 0.40% |
| 13 | VBA | 1.33% | 0.00% |
| 14 | Go | 1.26% | 0.20% |
| 15 | Ruby | 1.23% | -0.10% |
| 16 | Scala | 0.99% | -0.10% |
| 17 | Visual Basic | 0.92% | -0.20% |
| 18 | Rust | 0.67% | 0.20% |
| 19 | Abap | 0.51% | -0.10% |
| 20 | Perl | 0.50% | -0.10% |
| 21 | Dart | 0.46% | 0.20% |
| 22 | Groovy | 0.41% | -0.10% |
| 23 | Ada | 0.39% | 0.00% |
| 24 | Lua | 0.36% | 0.00% |
| 25 | Cobol | 0.34% | 0.00% |
| 26 | Haskell | 0.32% | 0.00% |
| 27 | Julia | 0.30% | 0.10% |
| 28 | Delphi | 0.26% | 0.00% |
IEEE Spectrum Ranking
The starting from a list of over 300 programming languages the row data gathered from GitHub, Google Search and Trends, Twitter, Stack Overflow, Reddit, Hacker News, Career Builder, Dice.com, and IEEE Xplore Digital Library.
It also gives you the most personalized ranking. The interactive interface allows us to filter by search trends, job trends, or open source community trends or you can modify the weighting of each dimension, enabling an extremely personalized ranking.
| Rank | Language | Score |
| 1 | Python | 100 |
| 2 | Java | 96.3 |
| 3 | C | 94.4 |
| 4 | C++ | 87.5 |
| 5 | R | 81.5 |
| 6 | JavaScript | 79.4 |
| 7 | C# | 74.5 |
| 8 | Matlab | 70.6 |
| 9 | Swift | 69.1 |
| 10 | Go | 68 |
Looking forward….
Considering the current trend in all aspects, I would strongly recommend to start with C/C++ and jump into the future technologies – Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep learning world!!
These are very broad concepts but you can begins with the Python Programming which very simple, realistic and of course most demanding language at the moment. You might be interested in simple guide on python programming.
Good luck & Happy Coding!!