Google programming languages made two notable moves in the TIOBE Index between January and February 2024: Go reached number 8 — its highest position ever in these rankings — and Carbon entered the top 100. The TIOBE Programming Community Index shows year-over-year trends in programming languages based on search engine volume.
Go shines in eighth place on TIOBE’s Programming Community Index
“Thanks to its growing adoption in industry, Go seems to be a language that has the capabilities to stay in the TIOBE index top 10 for a long time,” TIOBE Software CEO Paul Jansen wrote in the TIOBE Index post for February.
Go was 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 language of the year award for 2009, which indicates it gained the most popularity over the entire year. Go gradually declined to position #122 in 2015. In 2015, it started an aggressive half-year release cycle and gradually returned to prominence.
“Every new release, Go improved,” Jansen wrote. “In parallel, Docker and Kubernetes (both written in Go) started to become very popular as of 2016. This helped to regain confidence in Go.”
Go is widely used, 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 cross platforms),” Jansen told TechRepublic in an email. “It is faster and more scalable.”
SEE: Python Crash Course (TechRepublic Academy)
Carbon enters the TIOBE Programming Community Index’s top 100
The experimental, open-source language Carbon entered TIOBE’s top 100 for the first time. Carbon is a very young programming language that was developed by Google engineer Chandler Carruth in 2022. He developed Carbon to work with existing C++ code and C++ build systems. Carbon is meant to provide the benefits of C++ while adding simpler syntax, a modern generics system and modular code organization. Carbon is often used for back-end programming, web services and APIs.
Jansen told TechRepublic it’s remarkable that Carbon took “so long” to reach the top 100.
“The other Google language, Go, entered the TIOBE index top 20 in 2 months after its birth. Carbon is now more than 1.5 years old and things are changing faster nowadays,” he said. “So if it really would have been a hit, it should have been close to the top 10 by now instead of being in the top 100.”
TIOBE trends from February 2023 – February 2024
In February 2024, the top three programming languages are Python, C and C++. However, they all lost popularity over 2023 in TIOBE’s proprietary ranking system. Other major changes between February 2023 and February 2024 are:
- C# had the most growth year-over-year at +1.15%.
- JavaScript gained popularity from 7th to 6th place.
- SQL gained popularity from 8th to 7th place.
- Visual Basic fell from 6th to 9th place.
- Fortran rose dramatically from 24th to 11th place.
