The programming language Kotlin made waves because of its strong type system and other modern features.
In this month’s TIOBE Programming Community Index, the top three programming languages are Python, C and C++. Python dropped slightly in popularity, losing 3.02%, according to the index’s ranking system. There wasn’t much movement in the top 10 this month, with the only change being that PHP and Visual Basic swapped places. Kotlin, a language fully interoperable with Java, is rising in the ranks.
Each month, TIOBE Software ranks 100 programming languages by their popularity with the programming community.
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Kotlin entered the top 20 programming languages in the TIOBE Index two months ago at number 20 and has since risen from 18th place to 15th. Kotlin’s current rating is 1.15%, its highest since Google announced first-class support for Kotlin on Android in 2017. Previously, Kotlin had peaked at almost 1%, according to TIOBE’s proprietary system. Kotlin was designed by JetBrains developers in July 2011.
“Based on my experience, I am pretty sure Kotlin can reach a top 10 position,” said TIOBE Software CEO Paul Jansen. “If it can become part of the ‘big 4’ remains a question that is still to be answered.”
Kotlin isn’t just advantageous on Android, Jansen said; Kotlin is a viable competitor to Java in any domain, he proposed.
“Kotlin fits in the modern programming culture of expressive languages that have a strong type system and avoid occurrences of null pointer exceptions by design,” Jansen said.
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.
