Tiobe reports that the globe’s most favored programming language is experiencing a decline in market presence, ceding ground to more niche languages like R and Perl.
In the latest monthly Tiobe index of programming language popularity, Python continues to be the highest-ranked language, maintaining a lead of over 10 percentage points ahead of C, which sits in second place. However, Python’s overall popularity has seen a decrease in the last six months, dropping from its peak market share of 26.98% in July to 21.81% in the current Tiobe index.
According to Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen, this change indicates that various more specialized or domain-specific languages are incrementally increasing their market share, primarily at Python’s expense. R and Perl are highlighted as significant examples of this trend.
Jansen noted that R, a programming language designed for statistical computing, has historically been a strong rival to Python within data science. This month, R holds the eighth position with a 2.19% rating, a notable rise from its 15th-place ranking a year ago. Despite Python surpassing R in recent years, R now seems to be revitalizing its standing, having consistently returned to the Tiobe index’s top 10 for multiple months.
Concurrently, Perl has re-emerged as a significant player in the scripting domain. As Jansen explained, Perl, once the unchallenged leader in scripting, saw its popularity wane due to internal divisions and the advent of newer languages. Nevertheless, it has recently experienced a resurgence, climbing to 10th in the Tiobe index in September 2025 from 27th the previous year. This month, Perl holds the 11th spot in the index with a 1.67% rating, a substantial improvement from its 30th position at this time last year.
The Tiobe Programming Community index, updated monthly, functions as a measure of programming language popularity. Its ratings are derived from a specific formula that considers the global count of proficient engineers, available courses, and relevant third-party vendors for each language. This calculation involves analyzing data from over 20 websites, such as Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Bing.
Here are the top 10 languages from the Tiobe index for February 26:
- Python, 21.81%
- C, 11.05%
- C++, 8.55%
- Java, 8.12%
- C#, 6.83%
- JavaScript, 2.92%
- Visual Basic, 2.85%
- R, 2.19%
- SQL, 1.93%
- Delphi/Object Pascal, 1.88%
Conversely, the competing Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index gauges language popularity by examining the frequency with which tutorials for specific languages are searched on Google.
For February 2026, the Pypl index lists its top 10 as follows:
- Python, 31.17%
- C/C++, 14.96%
- Java, 10.46%
- R, 6.88%
- JavaScript, 5.05%
- Swift, 3.92%
- Rust, 3.19%
- C#, 3.19%
- PHP, 3.14%
- Ada, 2.81%
