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Title: Python Surges in Popularity. And So Does Perl

Link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/1...

Last month, Python "reached the highest ranking a programming language ever
had in the TIOBE index," according to TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen. "We thought
Python couldn't grow any further, but AI code assistants let Python take yet
another step forward." According to recent studies of Stanford University
(Yegor Denisov-Blanch), AI code assistants such as Microsoft Copilot, Cursor
or Google Gemini Code Assist are 20% more effective if used for popular
programming languages. The reason for this is obvious: there is more code for
these languages available to train the underlying models. This trend is
visible in the TIOBE index as well, where we see a consolidation of languages
at the top. Why would you start to learn a new obscure language for which no
AI assistance is available? This is the modern way of saying that you don't
want to learn a new language that is hardly documented and/or has too few
libraries that can help you. TIOBE's "Programming Community Index" attempts
to calculate the popularity of languages using the number of skilled
engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. It nows gives Python a 26.14%
rating, which TechRepublic notes "is well ahead of the next two programming
languages on this month's leaderboard: C++ is at 9.18% and C is 9.03%." But
the first top six languages haven't changed since last year... PythonC++C
JavaC#JavaScript Since August of 2024 SQL has dropped from its #7 rank down
to #12 (meaning Visual Basic and Go each rise up one rank from their position
a year ago, into the #7 and #8 positions). In the last year Perl has risen
from the #25 position to #9, beating out Delphi/Oracle Pascal at #10, and
Fortran at #11 (last year's #10). TIOBE CEO Jansen "told TechRepublic in an
email that many people were asking why Perl was becoming more popular, but he
didn't have a definitive answer. He said he double-checked the underlying
data and found the increase to be accurate, though the reason for the shift
remains unclear."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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