C# (and C) Grew in Popularity in 2025, Says TIOBE (tiobe.com)
- Reference: 0180561922
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/01/11/0532214/c-and-c-grew-in-popularity-in-2025-says-tiobe
- Source link: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
Over the last year the language showing the largest increase in its share of TIOBE's results was C#.
TIOBE founder/CEO Paul Jansen [1]looks back at how C++ evolved :
> From a language-design perspective, C# has often been an early adopter of new trends among mainstream languages. At the same time, it successfully made two major paradigm shifts: from Windows-only to cross-platform, and from Microsoft-owned to open source. C# has consistently evolved at the right moment.
>
> For many years now, there has been a direct battle between Java and C# for dominance in the business software market. I always assumed Java would eventually prevail, but after all this time the contest remains undecided. It is an open question whether Java — with its verbose, boilerplate-heavy style and Oracle ownership — can continue to keep C# at bay.
While C# remains stuck in the same #5 position it was in a year ago, its share of TIOBE's results rose 2.94% — the largest increase of the 100 languages in their rankngs.
But TIOBE's CEO notes that his rankings for the top 10 highest-scoring languages delivered "some interesting movements" in 2025:
> C and C++ swapped positions. [C rose to the #2 position — behind Python — while C++ dropped from #2 to the #4 rank that C held in January of 2025]. Although C++ is evolving faster than ever, some of its more radical changes — such as the modules concept — have yet to see widespread industry adoption. Meanwhile, C remains simple, fast, and extremely well suited to the ever-growing market of small embedded systems. Even Rust has struggled to penetrate this space, despite reaching an all-time high of position #13 this month.
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> So who were the other winners of 2025, besides C#? Perl made a surprising comeback, jumping from position #32 to #11 and re-entering the top 20. Another language returning to the top 10 is R, driven largely by continued growth in data science and statistical computing.
>
> Of course, where there are winners, there are also losers. Go appears to have permanently lost its place in the top 10 during 2025. The same seems true for Ruby, which fell out of the top 20 and is unlikely to return anytime soon.
>
> What can we expect from 2026? I have a long history of making incorrect predictions, but I suspect that TypeScript will finally break into the top 20. Additionally, Zig, which climbed from position #61 to #42 in 2025, looks like a strong candidate to enter the TIOBE top 30.
Here's how TIOBE estimated the 10 most popularity programming languages at the end of 2025
Python
C
Java
C++
C#
JavaScript
Visual Basic
SQL
Delphi/Object Pascal
R
[1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
who's using C ? (Score:2)
C is always so high in these ranking things.
what am i missing ? loads of driver work ? embedded systems ? why would you use C when there's Rust ?
Re: (Score:2)
the rankings are fucking bullshit, no matter which language you think should be top or bottom.
their "metric" is "we went to google, and used google's estimated number of pages referencing this language"
that's it. that's the entire fucking index. google de-listed a fuckton of older pages on the internet. google changes their algo all the time. this "popularity" contest has absolutely fucking nothing to do w/ actual usage, and is entirely at the whims of google's day to day enshitification of their search eng
Re: (Score:2)
I prefer to write Python for purely practical reasons; but as someone who routinely chooses C whenever they don't write Python (...and I used to be very proficient in C++ back in the day, maybe until 2020-ish), here's why: it's simply a fun language to write software in. It's like driving a go-cart :-)
Any alternative out there is blown out of proportion, brings in little value, for a cartload of WTFs in return.
C++? What does it offer above C? Objects and exceptions, you can have most those in C too (just ta
Re: (Score:2)
"C++? What does it offer above C?"
Ther than what you mentioned - the STL. In my line of work I use internal program data storage a lot and frankly the thought of having to roll my own dynamic array, linked list (for the 10^6th time) or worse a map/dictionary to do basic stuff that comes for free in C++ and other languages puts me off C for all but low level systems and network utility work these days.
I read some articles & comments (Score:2)
That suggested lots of software was going to be rewritten in rust by using vibecoding, I almost choked on my coffee when I read that
Re: (Score:2)
Yes you did read such an article.
Perhaps it was the one from some MS guy. Luckily it turned out to be nonsense. It was just some MicroSoft droid talking about some job offering working on some research project he had dreamed up.
Or it could have been one about DARPA (I think), again just an announcement of an AI drive translation research project.
As it happens by way of fun and experiment I have been getting LLMs to create Rust applications for me for the last couple of months. Nothing very big and not essen
Re: (Score:2)
> I'm amazed at how well they have worked out.
It could be the ratio of good versus bad Rust code is higher than others that have been available on the internet for a longer time. Then the LLMs will spit out statistically better code.
Joke ranking (Score:2)
There must be a more serious ranking than this. Can we get posts about that instead?
Re: (Score:1)
> There must be a more serious ranking than this. Can we get posts about that instead?
I'd rather take a vote as to why anyone still gives a shit about TIOBE rankings.
Would defenders of TIOBE prefer to wait until AI is doing the rankings, or is there a more valid reason we suspect it is doing that now. With vibe coding.
The sig worked! Yes! (Score:2)
> C++ dropped from #2 to the #4 rank that C held
Thanks, Slashdot!
Between Completely Useless and Mildly Interesting (Score:2)
This index is a quarterly (?) ritual for Slashdot and its between completely useless and midly interesting ever since 2001. We don't know what the exact metrics are, what statements we can derive from it and for which audience it could be really important (if ever).
We don't know what that kind of "popularity" actually means: only the top 2 of the list are over 10%, no. 9 is already under 2% of popularity.
If you are long enough in the SW engineering field, you'll meet some language, whether you like them or
Python (Score:3)
Python is the top language solely because it is used to teach beginners, and those beginners never move on.
The advantage of using Python to teach beginners is its simplicity: you don't have to know object oriented programming, or structured programming, to start out.
People choose Python because it's what they know, not because they've looked around to see what they like. Similarly people choose C# because if you want to program on Windows, that's the language.
Re: (Score:2)
"Beginners" is a large population. It includes freshmen and high schoolers, but also includes anyone who has a job description and skills that have nothing to do with CS and programming at all. That includes experts in a completely different field.
Python is popular because it caters to those who do not program for a living, and have no intention of ever doing so seriously.
About that... (Score:2)
> Python is the top language solely because it is used to teach beginners, and those beginners never move on.
I consider myself to be a seasoned programmer, and my language of choice these days is Python, for purely practical reasons.
For reference, I earned my first money off that by the end of last millenium, in my late teens. I started out seriously learning programming with C in self-learning, if we ignore the brief first contact I had with BASIC in 3rd grade. (It said C++ on the book cover, but it was actually a bad style of C -- I realized that many years later.) I eventually learned "real" C++ and spent liter
It Just Works (Score:3)
C++ dev here. However in my recent job I've been pivoted (not my choice) to Python and to be honest, I don't have a problem with it. Yes the indentation-has-syntactic meaning is annoying and the language is slooooow (compared to C/C++ anyway), but it does the job, is easy to read and there are libraries for pretty much any common backend task (frontend GUI side not so much but thats not my area so not my problem).
Also regards to C++, frankly I was getting tired of playing catch up with every idiotic ivory t
Tracking Irrelevance. (Score:1)
> Python is the top language solely because it is used to teach beginners, and those beginners never move on.
In the Real World, the 'top' language is the one that fucking works to meet the requirements.
Tracking the popularity of C after fifty fucking years? Why? Because you're worried it going somewhere? The COBOL support team still on the bank payroll hasn't stopped laughing about that since being dragged out of retirement for Y2K.
The logic of choosing the applicable solution when coding, doesn't really need the irrelevance of a cheerleading squad. What's next? TIOBE trading cards?
Re: (Score:2)
> In the Real World, the 'top' language is the one that fucking works to meet the requirements.
That's why an engineer would choose the language. Look at all the benefits and drawbacks, choose what works best.
In the real world, people choose what they know. They don't look at anything else.