What just happened? For the first time in over 20 years, the Python programming language has overtaken Java, JavaScript, and C as the most popular language. The updated rankings for October revealed achievement through Tiobe, an index that calculates results based on web searches.

Tiobe, a company specializing in software quality assessment and monitoring, has tracked the popularity of programming languages ​​over the past two decades. It uses queries on popular search engines and websites such as Google, Bing, Yahoo !, Wikipedia, and YouTube to assemble its index. A total of 25 search engines and sites are reviewed in the process.

The index itself is not about the best programming language per se or the language in which the most lines of code have been written, but strictly the number of searches for languages ​​on search engines. So while some may not take seriously the feat Python has achieved based on the methodology used, this is still a milestone given that this is the first time in 20 years that Python tops the rankings.

“Python, which started out as a simple scripting language, as an alternative to Perl, has grown to maturity. Its ease of learning, huge amount of libraries, and widespread use in all kinds of fields have made it the language most popular programming today, ”said Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen.

As shown in Tiobe’s “Programming Language of the Year” list, awarded for having the highest increase in grades in a year, Python has kept up the conversation among other popular languages ​​since 2007 by winning four times. .

Python at the top of the index, however, wasn’t necessarily due to an increase in searches. Instead, other languages ​​falling into the search saw that an 11.27% share for Python was enough to get it to take the lead. C fell 5.79% from October 2020 to an 11.16% share in the index, while Java fell 2.11% to 10.46%.

The other languages ​​that topped the October index top 10 were C ++, C #, Visual Basic, JavaScript, SQL, PHP, and Assembly Language.

A 2020 survey based on 17,000 responses from developers showed how JavaScript remains the most widely used programming language. The report also found that Python added 2.2 million developers, mainly due to the increase in both machine learning and data science.