Indicator of programming languages popularity TIOBE Programming Community index announced with its December headline that C language has been going down since November 2015. “The programming language of all programming languages C is consistently going down since November 2015. The language was in a range of 15% to 20% for more than 15 years and this year it suddenly started to suffer. Its ratings are now less than 10% and there is no clear way back to the top,” according to software quality company TIOBE index.
What has happened to C language that has caused its popularity to consistently go down during the past year?
According to TIOBE Index there are three main reasons why this is happening to C:
1- It is not a language that you think of while writing programs for popular fields such as mobile apps or websites
2- It is not evolving that much
3- There is no big company promoting the language
As of November 2016, Java continues to be on the lead, followed by C, C++, Python, and Visual Basic.NET respectively. Java, C, C++, C#, and Python have kept their top 5 position since September 2015 until this December. Java, C, C++, and Python continue to be on TIOBE Index’s top 5, while C# which has gone down by 0.94% (positioned in the sixth place) has been replaced by Visual Basic.NET which this December manaed to go up by 0.91% ranking the fifth.
On November 2016, TIOBE announced that Haskell may stand a chance to hit TIOBE Index top 20. “Some people say that Haskell is the most mature purely functional programming language available nowadays. It has quite a long history, dating back from 1990 and its community is growing, although slowly. This month Haskell is only 0.255% away from the top 20 at position 23. Let's see what happens the next few months,” according to TIOBE index.
In October TIOBE index also pointed out how fast programming language Go was gaining popularity and suggested that Go might even be the 2016 winner if it continues to progress with the same speed. With a remarkable increase of 1.67%, programming language Go managed to be part of TIOBE top 20, ranking in the sixteenth position, followed by Groovy, R, MATLAB, and PL/SQL. Currently GO has gone up by 1.74% and ranks in the 16th position.
“There are only 2 languages with an increase of more than 1% if compared to the same period last year, i.e. Go and Groovy. Note that Groovy ended 2015 with a bang, so its annual growth will be much less around January 2017. Google's Go language seems to be unrivalled, probably boosted by the immense popularity of Docker, the container application that is written in Go,” according to TIOBE index.