The TIOBE Index ranks Fortran at 17, and the Fortran community seems really hyped about that. Meanwhile, Fortran doesn’t even make it to the PYPL list. Not sure how this discrepancy occurs.
Since there are many questions about the way the TIOBE index is assembled, a special page is devoted to its definition. Basically the calculation comes down to counting hits for the search query
+"<language> programming"
We should really stop comparing languages 
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From PYPL’s FAQ (at the bottom):
Why is PYPL so different from TIOBE?
The TIOBE Index is a lagging indicator. It counts the number of web pages with the language name. Objective-c programming has over 20 million pages on the web, [s] while C programming has only 11 million. [s] This explains why Objective-C has a high TIOBE ranking. But who is reading those Objective-C web pages ? Hardly anyone, according to Google Trends data. Objective C programming is searched 30 times less than C programming. [s] In fact, the use of programming by the TIOBE index is misleading (see next question).
So, yeah, kinda makes sense that TIOBE favors languages that have been around a long time.
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Provided that TIOBE has its own shortcomings, this should favour Fortran over all languages, forever, but now it’s correctly capturing the new interest in this language.
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Julia is now at 24th at PYPL (a “leading indicator”) with “-0.0 %” trend, e.g. up to 20th in the US, just ahead of Perl… while down to 18th in France. TIOBE ranks Julia the same for July as last month.
In Germany, for PYPL, Abap pumps 11 places to 10th place… very strange (incredible?) even with SAP from Germany (and Cobol, a similar language, down 6 places to 26th). Julia there 23rd, not really competing with SAP/Abap… Stats are possibly noisy month-to-month at least for individual countries.
Julia swings back up in France to highest ever 12th place (2.18%) at PYPL. Since the rank has been erratic, I’m not sure we should read much into it, still looking at the graph it (if you choose Julia) seems to be going up (or is it just measuring some famous woman named Julia there…?). Maybe JuliaCon has an effect, while not clear for other countries. Developed ones, e.g. Germany do better and sadly for Viral worst in India.
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Julia is now 19th between Kotlin and Rust at IEEE Spectrum, and is their 12th if you only have Enterprise checked, and 9th, just ahead of R, if you additionally have Trending checked.
August Headline: Data Mining and AI languages are booming in the TIOBE index
[…] Nowadays we have the same with data mining and AI. […] The most striking example is Python […] Even old languages see a revival because of this, like the surge of Fortran. And, even more astonishing, we see Prolog re-entering the top 20 after 15 years… making an unexpected comeback. Prolog is used in IBM’s Watson, one of the most well known AI engines. The only exception to all this is R, which is as opposed to the others, losing some positions. I guess Python is eating R’s market share. Other interesting moves this month are: Rust from position #27 to #24 and Julia from position #35 to #26. Both Rust and Julia are strong candidates for a permanent top 20 position. – Paul Jansen CEO TIOBE Software
It’s unclear if Julia is referred to as AI or ML language (I would say both apply for Julia), or only Python and Prolog meant for. Julia has the highest rank of all recent languages, except for Swift and Rust, while not its highest ever, Julia was 23rd, higher than Rust now (while Rust’s was 18th in September). I suppose the moves “this month” are for since one year back (because I do not recall 36th then)? Fortran in 13th place just ahead of R is unexpected.
Note this page is not updated, i.e. 28th highest rank for Julia is wrong:
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/julia/
I was expecting RedMonk index out, even as far back as June, to keep its sex-month schedule, so possibly it’s just late or no longer maintained.
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If this is true I am probably responsible for upwards movement of 3-5 places alone.
I seriously hope it won’t be. The label “X language” almost automatically decimates the usage and funding of a language after the next X winter.
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Julia (-4): Lastly, as a language we are periodically asked about, it’s worth noting that Julia has actually taken a few steps back. A year ago at this time Julia was poised just outside the Top 20 at #24, but in this quarters run it had dropped back to #28. It’s important to note, as always, that the absolute difference between languages becomes less significant the further down the rankings one goes, but a negative performance such as this for a language is generally not encouraging. In Julia’s case, part of the difficulty lies in its target area; with a notable focus on analysis, Julia often finds itself competing for developers’ attention with Python and R, two languages that whatever their flaws, have proven to be both popular and sustainably so. This has contributed, in a chicken and egg type problem, to a perceived lack of life in the surrounding ecosystem. That being said, it’s notable that Julia Computing, a commercial company started by the Julia project founders, just took in a $24M round of funding. We’ll be watching over the next few quarters to see whether the dollars injected into this ecosystem have any measurable impact.
Yes, let’s hope so, and I’ll look forward to seeing if the funding, and Williams Formula 1 promotion, that seems linked to it, will help.
Why?
Re: Redmonk, I probably shouldn’t bother, but I check these whenever they come out just to look at the x-axis of the graph (Github PRs, ignoring StackOverflow). On that metric, Julia was ‘overtaken’ by Kotlin as of 2019/1, Elixir as of 2019/6, and by Dart as of 2021/1. Overall, there’s been a consistent, very gradual move to the right, e.g. ‘overtaking’ Perl this time around.
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- Julia
: position: 28 Ratings: 0.52%
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First time on top 20 I believe; with choosing only Enterprise, then 13th (EDIT: both one rank lower than before, 11th however is I think highest rank, when Trending combined with Enterprise):
At PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language index that claims to be trending Julia 23th, in the US 17th, and for Germany 15th. In other news Python hit 1st at TIOBE, pushing C to second place.
For France, Julia was previously ranked 13th, and that seems to have been a fluke (EDIT: or not? For Dec. up to 11th). Now the last places on the list 19-22 have “0.0%” share (and on global list only last place 28th Haskell has “0.0%” share). Which mean all other languages are round-off noise, under 0.05%. We knew languages have a “long-tail distribution”, but it might be more extreme than you think, assuming the share is actually calculated well… Note, e.g. at TIOBE, the distribution of “share” is much wider, look at their 100 lanuages.
The France Julia actress theory or socialite, or some other (temporary) false alarm, seems now very plausible.
On that page of the PYPL index I saw a language I didn’t know about growing with “5 arrows” and being more popular than Julia, so I went to googling it to know “What is this new language about?”
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You can have good income when being an ABAP expert…
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If it’s accurate at PYPL for May, Julia at 15th (and MATLAB 10th) in the US, while globally Julia 25th:
[A question how reliable, with R 4th in the US, ahead of C/C++ 5th.]
Note, compared to TIOBE, for April, with them stating:
Good old MATLAB is about to drop out of the top 20 for the first time in more than 10 years. […] And since MATLAB licenses are rather expensive, alternatives are catching up quickly now. Its main competitors are Python (currently number 1) and Julia (moving from position 32 to position 26 this month).
If the numbers they have (which the rank is based on) are accurate, then MATLAB 0.75%/0.48% = only 56% more popular…
[EDIT: For May Julia 25th, thus MATLAB only 0.82%/0.64% = 28% more popular…]
At IEEE Spectrum for 2021, Julia is 20th, 16th as a trending language, and 11th as trending enterprise language.
At The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2022 – tecosystems (only published in March…) hard to read the rank from the graph, but Julia and MATLAB seem to have comparable rank, and at least both way ahead of Fortran…
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I think best so far on TIOBE index at 21st, and they start explaining September stats this way:
The Julia programming language is only 0.05% away from a top 20 position. Julia is designed for numerical analysis and computational science. There are many competing languages in that field. So what makes Julia stand out? Julia beats Matlab because it is much more modern and it can be used free of charge. Furthermore, Julia beats Python and R because it is much faster. Since there is a huge demand in the number crunching and modeling field, Julia has a serious chance to enter the top 20 in the near future. Note that the language Rust has also been knocking on the top 20 door for quite some time, but did not succeed so far. Time will tell whether Julia will endure the same fate.
I think I’ll update the title of the thread.
To compare, at PYPL Julia is 23rd (0.41 %) globally but is highest in France at 14th (2.05 %), then in the UK:
15
Julia 1.83 %
and the US:
18
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This is awesome!
… as long as it shows Julia ascendant. But if Julia slips in the ranking, it doesn’t matter because TIOBE doesn’t measure anything useful.
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This guy gets it.
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We only care if the data is good, also I have no idea how TIOBE gets to those results, there is no way assembly is similarly popular to javascript.
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