In the latest report published by Tiobe Software, the popularity of programming languages for the month of September was analyzed. One significant finding was the rise of Perl in the rankings, moving from the 27th spot to the 10th position over the past year. The increase in popularity for Perl was consistent, starting at 0.49% in February and reaching 2.08% in August.
There were no major events specifically related to Perl that could explain its sudden surge in popularity. However, Tiobe’s head attributes this growth to the high number of Perl books sold on Amazon, with Perl having four times more books available than PHP and seven times more than Rust.
The report also noted the appreciation for the language outfit Perl 6/Raku, indicating a resurgence of interest in Perl due to its text processing capabilities and advanced regular expressions, which have become increasingly important with the rise of AI platforms. Perl’s peak in popularity was in March 2003 when it reached the 3rd position in the rankings.
Another language that stood out in the rankings was SI, which climbed to the 3rd spot compared to September of the previous year, displacing Java to 4th place. Additionally, Pascal, R, ADA, and Assembler also saw significant increases in popularity. Python and C++ maintained their positions at the top two spots, while other languages like Java, SQL, Fortran, PHP, Rust, Matlab, and Kotlin experienced declines in popularity.
Tiobe’s analysis is based on search engine query statistics from platforms such as Google, Bing, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, and Baidu. The report provides valuable insights into the shifting landscape of programming language popularity.
In the September ranking by Pypl, which uses Google Trends data, notable changes in popularity were observed. C/C++ moved up to the 4th spot, surpassing JavaScript. Objective-C, ADA, Ruby, Lua, Julia, and Pascal also saw increases in popularity, while Groovy, VBA, TypeScript, Kotlin, Dart, and Scala experienced declines.
In addition to Tiobe’s report, the updated Redmonk ranking for 2025 was released. This ranking is based on popularity on GitHub and discussions on Stack Overflow. The top twenty languages in this ranking had some changes compared to the previous year, with CSS dropping a position and C++ rising in the rankings.