TIOBE Index News (October 2023): Competition Between C# and Java Heats Up

C# is on track to take fourth place in the TIOBE Programming Community Index, but the rankings stick to the status quo in October.

In this month’s TIOBE Programming Community Index, the top three programming languages are Python, C and C++.

C++ rose slightly in popularity, gaining 0.76% according to the index’s ranking system.

Each month, TIOBE Software ranks 100 programming languages by their popularity with the programming community.

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C# approaches Java’s number four spot

C# gained enough points and Java lost enough that the two competing languages might swap places in the rankings soon. Java has dropped in popularity since its parent company Oracle introduced a paid license in 2014, while C#’s popularity has grown. Conversely, C# has been free and open source since it was disambiguated from Microsoft’s Visual Studio in 2014. This easy accessibility is appealing to a large number of developers.

C# and Java have been in competition for more than 20 years due to their use in similar domains, said TIOBE Software CEO Paul Jansen. He noted that Java has gradually decreased in popularity since the introduction of a paid license after Java 8.

SEE: Top 10 list of programming languages from this month’s TIOBE Index and previous months in 2023 (TechRepublic)

“The Java language definition has not changed much the past few years, and Kotlin — its fully compatible direct competitor — is easier to use and free of charge,” Jansen wrote in October 2023. (Kotlin returned to the top 20 last month.)

Java showed a dramatic decline of -3.92% on TIOBE’s system. While the programming language still sits at number four, Jansen notes that C# has never been this close to catching up to Java. C#, which remains at number five, gained 3.29%, the largest gain of all of the recorded programming languages annually.

What is the TIOBE Programming Community Index?

The TIOBE Programming Community Index is a leaderboard of programming languages ranked by TIOBE’s points system for the popularity of each language. The index is updated once a month. Ratings are determined by the community of engineers, courses and third-party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are also used to calculate the ratings.

TIOBE notes that the index doesn’t measure “the best” programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written — rather, it’s a measure of general popularity and awareness.

TIOBE positions its index as a good tool for checking whether a professional programmer’s skills are still up to date or for making a strategic decision about what programming language one should adopt when building a new software system.