100 Most Popular Programming Languages Of 2017

Short Bytes: Apart from the popular programming languages like Java, C++, Python, JS, etc., there are tons of other languages that are being used for specific purposes. Based on the popular TIOBE Index, we are sharing the list of the top 100 most popular programming languages of 2017. These languages have different features and strengths that different developers appreciate.

Over the past couple of decades, software engineering, and web development have grown exponentially in terms of popularity. That’s why, from time to time, we keep telling you the highest paying software skills and programming languages that one needs to learn.

Every alternate day, a new programming language is born. This vast choice to choose a programming language also makes it very tough to select the first programming language. In that case, you can refer to our article that tells how to select your first programming language.

A widely used metric to choose a programming language is the popularity of languages. Having said, we are here with the 100 most popular programming languages of 2017. This list is based on the data obtained from TIOBE Programming Community Index.

TIOBE is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages and it’s updated regularly. It uses the popular search metrics as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Wikipedia, Amazon, Baidu, and YouTube for calculating the ratings.

Top 100 programming languages

We’re going to start the list of top 100 programming languages by listing the top 20 programming languages, their comparison with the last year’s numbers, etc.

Mar 2017	Mar 2016	Change	Programming Language	Ratings	Change
1	1		Java	16.384%	-4.14%
2	2		C	7.742%	-6.86%
3	3		C++	5.184%	-1.54%
4	4		C#	4.409%	+0.14%
5	5		Python	3.919%	-0.34%
6	7		Visual Basic .NET	3.174%	+0.61%
7	6		PHP	3.009%	+0.24%
8	8		JavaScript	2.667%	+0.33%
9	11		Delphi/Object Pascal	2.544%	+0.54%
10	14		Swift	2.268%	+0.68%
11	9		Perl	2.261%	+0.01%
12	10		Ruby	2.254%	+0.02%
13	12		Assembly language	2.232%	+0.39%
14	16		R	2.016%	+0.73%
15	13		Visual Basic	2.008%	+0.33%
16	15		Objective-C	1.997%	+0.54%
17	48		Go	1.982%	+1.78%
18	18		MATLAB	1.854%	+0.66%
19	19		PL/SQL	1.672%	+0.48%
20	26		Scratch	1.472%	+0.70%

Source: TIOBE

For the first time, in TIOBE’s index, Swift has entered in the top 10 list. Swift was launched 3 years ago for replacing iOS development language Objective-C. However, TIOBE index predicts that Swift isn’t expected to rise much further as its use is limited to Apple’s ecosystem.

Let’s take a look at the top 21-50 programming languages:

Position	Programming Language	Ratings
21	SAS	1.285%
22	D	1.230%
23	Dart	1.200%
24	ABAP	1.154%
25	COBOL	1.039%
26	Ada	0.781%
27	Fortran	0.740%
28	Transact-SQL	0.738%
29	Lua	0.736%
30	Scala	0.719%
31	Logo	0.717%
32	F#	0.688%
33	Lisp	0.656%
34	LabVIEW	0.577%
35	Prolog	0.544%
36	Haskell	0.502%
37	Scheme	0.478%
38	Groovy	0.466%
39	RPG (OS/400)	0.435%
40	Apex	0.426%
41	Erlang	0.412%
42	MQL4	0.396%
43	Rust	0.382%
44	Bash	0.348%
45	Ladder Logic	0.339%
46	Q	0.321%
47	Julia	0.320%
48	Alice	0.290%
49	VHDL	0.281%
50	Awk	0.264%

Source: TIOBE

The final top 51-100 programming languages have been listed below in an alphabetical manner. It’s not a ranking as their differences are very small:

Top Programming languages 51-100

(Visual) FoxPro, ABC, ActionScript, APL, AutoLISP, bc, BlitzMax, Bourne shell, C shell, CFML, cg, CL (OS/400), Clipper, Clojure, Common Lisp, Crystal, Eiffel, Elixir, Elm, Emacs Lisp, Forth, Hack, Icon, IDL, Inform, Io, J, Korn shell, Kotlin, Maple, ML, NATURAL, NXT-G, OCaml, OpenCL, OpenEdge ABL, Oz, PL/I, PowerShell, REXX, Ring, S, Smalltalk, SPARK, SPSS, Standard ML, Stata, Tcl, VBScript, Verilog

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