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Top Programming Languages 2025

• dtgriscom 1y ago
  Yessss! Shell scripts at number nine!
  • Qxliangg 1y ago
    Pretty sweet,i use it almost everyday,which brings me a lot of fun.
• hackthemack 1y ago
  I was pondering similar thoughts. Will LLM assistants ossify our current programming languages? My limited testing seems to show LLM assistants do well the more popular the language is (more data in its training), so is the hurdle for adoption of something new going to get even higher? In an alternate universe, if LLM only had object oriented code to train on, would anyone push programming forward in other styles?
  • mock-possum 1y ago
    Of course it’s always been easier to find talent when working in more popular languages. That’s the big risk you take when you choose the road less traveled.
    • AstroBen 1y ago
      easier to find people, not talent. Some tiny niche languages have a very high proportion of talented developers
      • mock-possum 1y ago
        Sorry I meant ‘talent’ as slang for a worker qualified to fill a roll with minimal training, I.e. a hire via a ‘talent agency’ or head hunter
    • a96 1y ago
      Easier to find CV's with a word. In reality, just about any programmer should be able and willing to pick up a language when needed. Unless you have hyperspecific needs with some massive framework, a pattern matching HR is not a good way to find programmers.
  • christophilus 1y ago
    I recently picked up Hare, which is quite obscure, and Claude was helpful as a better— albeit hallucinogenic— Google. I think LLMs may not lead to as much ossification as I’d originally feared.
    • fuzztester 1y ago
      What is your impression of Hare? I had looked at it recently while checking out C-like languages. (Others included Odin and C3.) I read some of the Hare docs and examples, and had watched a video about it on Kris Jenkins' Developer Voices channel, which was where I got to know about it.
      • christophilus 1y ago
        I like it much more than Zig, and while I like Odin’s syntax more, Hare is more focused on the types of tooling I want to build, so I find Hare’s stdlib preferable. Give it a spin. It’s a simple language.
        • fuzztester 1y ago
          Interesting, thanks!
        • fuzztester 1y ago
          I started reading the Hare tutorial again because of your comment. Looks good so far. Just one note for anyone else wanting to check it out: There are a few sections in the tutorial which are empty and marked as TODO. E.g. "Using default values" and "Handling allocation failure" (the empty sections seen so far, there may be others below). Still going to check the language out.
  • zenmac 1y ago
    >My limited testing seems to show LLM assistants do well the more popular the language is (more data in its training), so is the hurdle for adoption of something new going to get even higher Not only that they also tend to answer using the the more popular languages or tool event when it is NOT necessary. And when you call it out on it, it will respond with something like: "you are absolutely right, this is not necessary and potentially confusing. Let me provide you with a cleaner, more appropriate setup...." Why doesn't it just respond that the first time? And the code it provided works, but very convoluted. if wasn't checked carefully by an experienced dev person to ask the right question one would never get the second answer, and then that vibe code will just end up in git repo and deployed all over the place. Got the feeling some big corp may just paid some money to have their plugin/code to on the first answer even when it is NOT necessary. This could be very problematic, I'm sure people in advertising are just all licking their chops on how they can capitalized on that. If one thing currently ad industry is bad, wait until that is infused into all the models. We really need ways to 1. Train our own models in the open, with weight and the data it is trained on. Kinda like the reproducible built process that Nix is doing for building repos. 2. Ways to debug the model on inference time. The <think> tag is great, and I suspect not everything is transparent in that process. Is there something equivalent of formal verification for model inference?
  • raincole 1y ago
    > is the hurdle for adoption of something new going to get even higher? Yes. But today the only two reasons to use niche languages are[0] 1) you have existing codebases or libraries in that language 2) you're facing quite domain-specific problems where the domain experts all use that language. In either cases you won't just use Java because LLMs are good at Java. [0]: besides for fun or 'for resume'
• maroon_unperson 1y ago
  LLMs could also ease adoption of new languages by making hiring less of a barrier to using something more niche. It becomes easier for someone to hit the ground running and be productive even if they still need to put the time in to become an expert. Instead I find myself more concerned with which virtual machine or compiler tool chain the language operates against. Does it need to ship with a VM or does it compile to a binary? Do I want garbage collection for this project? Maybe in that way the decision moves up an abstaction layer the same way we largely moved away from assembly languages and caring about specific processor features.
  • system2 1y ago
    If you ask Claude or ChatGPT, they both say Python is their preferred building tool. It will push Python further.
• mynegation 1y ago
  I totally expected JavaScript to get the 2nd spot but looks like TypeScript pulled the votes away. I personally consider JavaScript and TypeScript to be close enough for their numbers to be added up.
  • channel_t 1y ago
    I agree, I think it makes most sense to add them up to be the true #2.
    • sprobertson 1y ago
      And #1 on the jobs chart
    • rootlocus 1y ago
      Then you should probably add kotlin and java together as well. They share the same purpose, use the same VM, usually live in the same project, have native compatibility, are used with the same frameworks, etc.
      • whstl 1y ago
        True. Pretty much every Kotlin recruitment message I got was because of past Java experience, so the job market seems to agree with you.
      • jillesvangurp 1y ago
        Especially considering Kotlin is used as a drop in replacement for Java in a lot of projects. Especially when using the type of frameworks often associated with Java (Spring, Quarkus, etc.). Personally, I think statistics like this are biased towards the median of the past few decades and do not necessarily tell much about the future; other than that things apparently move very slowly and people are mostly conservative and stuck in their ways. Cobol is still in that list. Right above Elixir, which apparently is a bit of a niche language. Kotlin has only been around for about 15 years, and the 1.0 release was actually only nine years ago. Java was released 30 years ago and it's been dominant in enterprise development for 25 years now. So, no surprise that Java is nearer to the top. Python is surprising but it's been around for quite long and gained a lot of popularity outside the traditional computer science crowd. I know biochemists, physicists, etc. that all use python. And it's a great language for beginners obviously. It's not so much that people switched to python but that it is driving the growth of the overall programmer community. Most new programmers use python these days and that explains why it is the #1. Javascript has had a virtual monopoly on basically anything that runs in a browser, which is of course the most popular way to distribute code these days. Especially since plugins were deprecated and things like applets, flash, etc. disappeared around fifteen years ago. Anything that ran on the web was either written in Javascript; or transpiled/compiled to it. WASM is starting to change that but it's early days. What the past 25 years tell us is that things definitely change. But very slowly. C++ still outranks Javascript. That's because it's mostly browsers where it is used. It's a lot less popular for other things. I like Kotlin, so I'm biased. But it's obviously not the most popular thing by a long shot. But popular doesn't mean good. I actually like python for small unimportant things. But I reach for Kotlin if I need to do it properly. I used to reach for Java. But Kotlin simply became the better tool for the job; at least for me. I even prefer it over typescript and I do occasionally use it for web frontend development. The transpiler is pretty good. And there's a WASM compiler too and Compose for WASM just entered beta. Kotlin seems future proof and it seems to be growing into wider adoption. There are a few million programmers around by Jetbrains counts. It's not nothing.
• daft_pink 1y ago
  It’s amazing where java is.
  • brap 1y ago
    If you’re working in a large team, and you’re not locked into the MS stack, and you’re not doing anything that needs to be super performant… Java is, by far, your best option. The tooling and ecosystem aren’t great compared to some of these languages, but Java itself can be pretty damn good. I used to be a hater many years ago but I’ve since grown to love it.
    • the_af 1y ago
      What is wrong with Java's tooling and ecosystem? Asking because it used to be the default a decade or so ago, with a vibrant ecosystem, so I find your remark surprising.
      • brap 1y ago
        Maven/Gradle don’t come close to the simplicity of npm, for example
        • raddan 1y ago
          Publishing a Maven package is also excruciatingly complicated. By contrast, NPM is actually too easy. I suspect that we see fewer supply chain attacks in the Java ecosystem because attackers are like “you know what.. never mind.”
        • clumsysmurf 1y ago
          Gradle keeps on improving. I use it for Android, and even though it is complex, and then add the Android Gradle Plugin complexity on top of that, I would not trade it for the iOS build system. One of my complaints with Gradle is that if you write a plugin (Java) it shares the classpath with other plugins. You might find some other plugin depending on some old version of a transitive dependency.
        • 1y ago
• armSixtyFour 1y ago
  huh. This seems to suggest there are more Rust jobs than Ruby. Wild considering how insanely popular Ruby was 10 years ago.
  • fuzztester 1y ago
    Ruby became popular mainly because of Rails, which has gone down somewhat in popularity in recent years. That may be why Ruby is less popular now than it was 10 years ago. Also, they (Ruby and Rails) got popular much before 10 years ago, like around 2006 / 2007, when the Web 2.0 wave was starting. I had worked on a couple of dot-com projects in Ruby on Rails at that time, that is how I know.
    • zenmac 1y ago
      And Python got popular cause of LLM AI thing. It is a shame, cause it is quite slow. I had some good time with jython back in the 2 days, but really wished something more elegant (nim/rust/ocaml) has taken over this AI thing instead of python. One thing is for sure, don't get tight down to one language cause it is popular today. Go with whatever make sense for you and your project.
      • js8 1y ago
        > And Python got popular cause of LLM AI thing. Not really, Python got popular in 2000s because it was the only sane of the three choices - Perl, Python, TCL. You must be young.
        • pjmlp 1y ago
          The magic word for Python's fame is Zope, the respective article on Dr. Dobbs, until then I never noticed it.
          • vkazanov 1y ago
            Zope is sooo 2000s! This is the first time ever I see somebody mention the framework I've spent a few years of my life with!
• cosmic_quanta 1y ago
  Well I'm happy that Haskell registers at all! At a level similar to ... LabView (oof). The article proper is rather uninteresting, I'm afraid.
  • chamomeal 1y ago
    It’s grating to see Haskell compared to labview, regardless of context lol
    • Joel_Mckay 1y ago
      Haskell is a fun language... LabView is a kick in the pants... I'd wager it is the installed base keeping LabView on life support. =3
      • 7thaccount 1y ago
        Labview seems like a pain (I haven't used it), but I guess it's super useful for some uses. I recall SpaceX uses it for controlling launches. It comes with models for all manner of hardware.
        • Joel_Mckay 1y ago
          NI has niche instrumentation product lines that have been around for some time. Yet, the modern licensing model jettisoned a lot of their long time proponents. Like many things in life, most problems were non-technical in nature. SpaceX is an interesting company, and it made some unique design choices. =3
        • hooskerdu 1y ago
          I really loved LabView
          • Joel_Mckay 1y ago
            NI rarely made established software better after a company acquisition. Generally, IT and Engineering agreed to deprecate their product lines off critical systems about 2 minutes after the deal went through. =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE
• torben-friis 1y ago
  As a backend dev (mostly working in fintech) I feel weirdly unable to find a target language to move to. After working with Node and Ruby for a while I really miss a static type system. - Typescript was limited by its option to allow non strictness. Nothing catches my eye, as it’s either Java/.Net and its enterprisey companies or Go, which might not be old but feels like it is, by design. Rust sounds fun, but its usecases don’t align much with my background. Any advice?
  • yxhuvud 1y ago
    You could try Crystal if you like the other parts of Ruby. But you probably ain't going to find a job writing it anytime soon.
  • TheDong 1y ago
    Take a page from janestreet's book: use ocaml. Rust is also a general purpose language, there's no reason you can't use it for just about any problem space.
    • misja111 1y ago
      I tried ocaml last year (I knew some Haskell and Scala already) and it was hell. The language itself was pretty, that's true. But the schism between Ocaml's stdlib and Jane Street's core lib was incredibly frustrating. I guess when you're working at Jane Street, use only their core lib and you get some proper onboarding, things could work great. However you're programming very much in a niche community then.
  • clumsysmurf 1y ago
    I have the same dilemma: a strongly typed / modern language with good tooling / library support. I'm also considering Kotlin / Gleam. With Kotlin, practically speaking, we're talking JVM again, along with its resource requirements.
    • smackeyacky 1y ago
      C# is the right answer here.
• pornel 1y ago
  It's hard to find good data sources for this, especially that StackOverflow is in decline[1]. IEEE's methodology[2] is sensible given what's possible, but the data sources are all flawed in some ways (that don't necessarily cancel each other out). The number of search results reported by Google is the most volatile indirect proxy signal. Search results include everything mentioning the query, without promising it being a fair representation of 2025. People using a language rarely refer to it literally as the "X programming language", and it's a stretch to count all publicity as a "top language" publicity. TIOBE uses this method too, and has the audacity to display it as a popularity with two decimal places, but their historical data shows that the "popularity" of C has dropped by half over two years, and then doubled next year. Meanwhile, C didn't budge at all. This method has a +/- 50% error margin. [1]: https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2023/12/14/language-rankings-update/ https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2023/12/14/language-rankings-u... [2]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-methodology-2025 https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-methodol...
  • abm53 1y ago
    Perhaps the best source would now be the statistics of LLM queries, if they were available. Edit: I see they raise this point at length themselves in TFA.
  • roywashere 1y ago
    Plus TIOBE had Perl enter the top 10 suddenly this year but I do not see any new developers. And Ada too! Where are all those Ada programmers?
    • WhereIsTheTruth 1y ago
      https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/packages?compare=ada,gcc,go,java-runtime-common,perl,php,python,ruby,rust,typescript https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/packages?compare=ada,gcc,go,ja... Ada seems pretty popular on Arch This data is kinda worthless for popularity contests, since they may get picked up by aur packages, but this gives a solid insight into wich languages are foundational I wish the same was available for other distros You can do the same with docker images curl -s https://hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/python/ | jq -r ".pull_count" 8244552364 curl -s https://hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/golang/ | jq -r ".pull_count" 2396145586 curl -s https://hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/perl/ | jq -r ".pull_count" 248786850 curl -s https://hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/rust/ | jq -r ".pull_count" 102699482 "Top Languages" doesn't mean "better" nor does it mean "best"
• AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  Given how mediocre LLMs are, I don't see this happening anytime soon... but I think a "better" LLM (that puts the "language" into large language model) can seamlessly translate between programming languages. Right now, it's apparent to me that LLMs are mostly tuned in the programming space for what n-gate would call "webshit", but I think it is a clear (to me) evolutionary step towards getting much better "porting" ability in LLMs. I don't think that is in the priority list of the LLM companies. But I think it would be a real economic boon: certainly there is a backlog of code/systems that needs to be "modernized" in enterprises, so there is a market. Ultimately I wonder if an LLM can be engineered to represent code in an intermediate form that is language-independent to a large extent, and "render" it to the desired language/platform when requested.
  • tasuki 1y ago
    > Given how mediocre LLMs are That's not a given... I think LLMs are amazing!
• gt0 1y ago
  I'd like to see some clarity in these stats, it can't just be me that finds it hard to believe that there are significantly more Python jobs than Java. I wonder if job listings are saying "Python, C++" or something, so that's a point for Python, even though, the job is < 1% Python just for test rigs or something.
  • akkad33 1y ago
    You'd be hard pressed to find a job posting in ML/ data analytics where python is not in the requirements
  • deleted 1y ago
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• dismalaf 1y ago
  Nice to see my beloved R still has some mindshare... Also Ruby.
• globalnode 1y ago
  lolrust
• bgwalter 1y ago
  The methodology involves search hits, Stackoverflow, conference and journal articles. In all of these Python is artificially over-represented. Search hits and Stackoverflow questions represent beginners who are force fed Python in university or in expensive Python consultancy sessions. Journal articles are full of "AI" topics, which use Python. Python is not used in any application on my machine apart from OS package managers. Python is used in web back ends, but is replaced by Go. "AI" is the only real stronghold due to inertia and marketing. Like the TIOBE index, the results of this so called survey are meaningless and of no relevance to the jobs market.
  • OutOfHere 1y ago
    Huh. If you hate AI as you sorely do, you will find any excuse to be dismissive. Besides AI development, Python is used heavily in data processing and data science, also in writing bots of any kind, and as a glue language to do numerous tasks. It is true that it is being replaced by Go in web backends, but it still sees heavy use in that too. Moreover, Python is the only language that many AIs can interactively use in their chat sessions.
    • lunias 1y ago
      Python is used heavily in data science (and a lot of other places) because people who go to university for non software engineering disciplines get taught Python because it's "the easy language that already has libraries for this research we're doing." Those people then go on to write more of these libraries. Their code does amazing things, but very slowly.
      • HankStallone 1y ago
        There's a good video series called "Programming Paradigms" by Jerry Cain, taken from his class at Stanford. I'm not sure how long ago it was, but it was before whiteboards, when they were still using chalk. He just started including Python that year when it was the up-and-coming thing, as an example of a higher-level language that does a lot of stuff for you. It probably seemed like a breeze for the students after the previous weeks spent on C, assembly, and Lisp, but at least they got some of the fundamentals of how things worked first.
• nnurmanov 1y ago
  English should be #1:)
  • kensai 1y ago
    Underrated comment! ;)
  • platevoltage 1y ago
    English is Turing complete I assume.
    • schoen 1y ago
      But its formal syntax and formal semantics are underspecified. People might not be able to agree on the interpretation of natural language sentences in general, or grammaticality judgments, or how to handle sentences that stop in
• jaxelr 1y ago
  Kinda surprising that I see nothing from Zig on all these lists.
  • Hemospectrum 1y ago
    I would be surprised to see it high in the rankings before it establishes certain backward compatibility guarantees.
  • runevault 1y ago
    How many people are waiting for it to hit 1.0? I am. I am interested in Zig, but until they can guarantee a stable point for an extended period of time I have limited interest. Same way with Rust gamedev I'm keeping an eye on Bevy but want it to hit 1.0. Some things pre-1.0 is fine, but more core pieces of dev like the language often warrant requiring greater stability guarantees.
  • ozgrakkurt 1y ago
    Don’t think zig will ever make it into popularity tbh. It is good for low level but it isn’t like rust or go. Rust and go are really good alternatives for c++ or java code, they just work, have good tooling etc. But I would never use zig for that kind of use case instead of rust since you don’t need to go full on engineering every dot mode. I switched to zig from rust for implementing a database since 6 months and have no regrets but just don’t think anyone would use it for writing backend code or other similar smaller things. I used to think similarly about rust before though so don’t really know anything
    • koeng 1y ago
      > I switched to zig from rust for implementing a database since 6 months and have no regrets but just don’t think anyone would use it for writing backend code or other similar smaller things. I've been thinking about starting a project in Zig rather than Go lately, even though I am skilled at Go. I really like working with more, cracked? or simply crazy people willing to learn an esoteric language, and zig fits the needs in particular I have (mostly very nice C interop) Would you recommend? How are the average zig contributors vs something like go?
• qwertytyyuu 1y ago
  I’m surprised to see js under c#
  • OccamsMirror 1y ago
    You should combine JS and TS for a more accurate ranking.
• kstrauser 1y ago
  I’m skeptical. There are more people writing PHP and Ruby than HTML? And HTML is a programming language? Those two very surprising results make me doubt the others. Elixir behind OCaml? Possible, I guess, but I know of several large Elixir shops and I haven’t heard much of OCaml in a while.
  • riffraff 1y ago
    Perhaps the people who pick HTML as "what programming language do you use" are a small number :)
  • wormius 1y ago
    HTML is a declarative programming language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming#Domain-specific_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming#Domain...
    • kstrauser 1y ago
      Nah. It’s a declarative language, but not a programming language. To prove me wrong, show an HTML program that does any kind of computation whatsoever. There’s not one. It’s not Turing complete. I doubt it’s even Turing partial. It’s a markup language, not a PL.
      • rekenaut 1y ago
        Where does this idea that a programming language has to be Turing complete come from? As far as I can tell from cursory searches, the most broadly understood understanding of a programming language is a formal language for directing computations on a computer. HTML does this, CSS does this, and SQL does this. Frankly even configuration languages like YAML or the spare INI file do this in the proper context. Can these languages do everything or even most computations you would be interested in doing in a computer? Of course not. But why should the definition be restricted to languages that can do everything?
        • 1y ago
• insane_dreamer 1y ago
  Java at #2? Is it really still being used much for new code in this day and age? Or is its popularity mostly due to so much legacy code out there to be maintained?
  • __rito__ 1y ago
    Java is still the default choice for many for enterprise software. Job-focused courses and curricula all over the world are still leaning big on Java ensuring a steady and large pool of okay Java devs. Job focused Bachelor courses and curricula highly outnumber rigorous CS courses like the ones you are likely to find in MIT, UCLA-B, IISc, IITs, Oxford, UCL, Tsinghua, Peking, etc.
  • oaiey 1y ago
    Yes. Companies with existing workforces are doing new software all the time. If you have a workforce with let us say 100 devs. Even if you hire 10 new ones temporarily or permanent, you for sure tell them: use what the other 100 do. It is not maintenance what drives this, it is the lack of momentum in your work force. And that is very okay. (Modern) Java and .NET are excellent choices. There is nothing wrong with them.
  • akkad33 1y ago
    Yes. Many startups using Java in europe
    • oaiey 1y ago
      And for simple reasons: no experiments in tech stack. No friction in hiring. Static typing (which sorts out JS and Python) and then you are there.
      • mfru 1y ago
        Java / Spring Boot + Angular is a very common stack i.e.
  • noisy_boy 1y ago
    It is a good choice if you want to use a non-Microsoft stack language (yes C# can be developed on Linux but the quality of the development experience on Linux isn't same as Windows) and want a vast ecosystem. Golang is too verbose due to lack of exceptions and the size of its ecosystem of third-party packages isn't anywhere as close to Java's. Swift is very nice but issues with ecosystem exist there too. Too steep a learning curve with Rust so more difficult to find developers. Modern Java has improved a lot compared to, say, Java 8 with record types, pattern matching, multiline strings etc. The pace of new features coming to Java has been quite high in recent times. Plus there is always the network effect.
• pipeline_peak 1y ago
  What’s going on with Swift? Seems surprisingly less popular considering it’s the official way to develop for Apple. Is it something to do with frameworks like React?
  • oaiey 1y ago
    Swift is a nice for one use case. The use cases outnumber the popularity in that niche.
• shpx 1y ago
  I wish there were less programming languages because every library needs to be rewritten as many times as there are languages, a combinatorial waste of time. Now that CoffeeScript is gone I would like to see all Ruby become Python.
• nromiun 1y ago
  Anything short of a big AI winter is not going to move Python from its top spot. As Python has become the first choice of output code for LLMs its dominance is only going to grow.
  • iainmerrick 1y ago
    Is Python really the first choice of output code? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't know the answer and I don't know where to look to find out. I would have assumed it might be JS and more specifically React -- isn't that what you often get if you ask an LLM to "make an app that does such-and-such"? (Experimental anecdata: I just asked Gemini to write an app and it gave me a single HTML file with embedded JS, no TS or React, Tailwind for CSS.) (Edit to add: then I asked it to "write some code" instead of "write an app", and this time it went with Python.)
    • nromiun 1y ago
      Maybe it was because LLMs were trained most on Python code, but yes they seem to prefer it.
      • iainmerrick 1y ago
        Again you're making unsupported assertions ("trained most on Python code") and coming to unsupported conclusions ("they seem to prefer it") -- my own very quick experiment shows that it depends on how you ask ("app" versus "code") at the very least. The choices of JS and Python were pretty solid for the prompts I gave. Maybe the LLM is, well, making a reasonable decision in context, rather than just defaulting to Python! "LLMs prefer Python" is an over-simplification. Python was already very popular, so I agree that LLMs are likely to entrench that popularity, but that doesn't mean Python will grow into other areas where it wasn't being used much before.
        • nromiun 1y ago
          Why are you verbosely repeating my own replies? You asked why, I told you a theory that MAYBE because they were trained on Python code. You do know that's how a LLM or even a simple neural network works right? Of course it is an over-simplification. Should I do an empirical scientific study before I can reply that MAYBE LLMs seem to prefer Python? I was talking from my own personal experience. Are you using a LLM to write your replies? Because they seem very odd to me.
• zwnow 1y ago
  And people try to convince me that there are Elixir jobs so its worth learning Elixir, hah
• mrheosuper 1y ago
  What is "Arduino" ? If it's the "Arduino" that hobbyist using to DIY device, then "Arduino" is not a language, it's C++.
  • pjmlp 1y ago
    Correct, but it is the same root cause that make people say HTML and CSS are programming languages, C and Fortran written libraries are "Python" libraries, and so forth.
  • figassis 1y ago
    Yes, that is weird and makes the chart lose credibility. So this likely should bump C++ a bit.
  • ComplexSystems 1y ago
    The Arduino docs call it the "Arduino programming language" for some reason, even though it's mostly just C++ with a few typedefs. I am not sure why.
    • mrheosuper 1y ago
      Maybe they don't want to confuse beginner. Saying it's C++ means some beginners will assume you can use standard lib like cout or printf.
      • 1718627440 1y ago
        You can use that though. Using the file system will cause runtime errors. The Arduino IDE is just a glorified build system around gcc with a package manager. I recently ported the behaviour of the IDE to Makefiles and it wasn't actually that hard.
    • platevoltage 1y ago
      I get why Arduino (the company) would call Arduino a language. It's supposed to be a gateway to programming, and it was for me, and I'm eternally grateful for it. This list calling Arduino a programming language zaps a bunch of credibility from it. It's C++.
• munchler 1y ago
  F# not listed at all? If that’s accurate (color me doubtful), people are missing out on a great language that runs on a popular platform. Personally, after learning to love F#, I’m never going back to C#.
  • pjmlp 1y ago
    Unfortunely Microsoft has mostly behaved as if it was a mistake to add F# to Visual Studio 2010. Nowdays CLR seems to have changed meaning to C# Language Runtime.
• sashank_1509 1y ago
  I’m shocked, Java is so high up in all categories. I have never met a single Java programmer, though to be fair I started my career fairly recently.
  • ileonichwiesz 1y ago
    They’re definitely underrepresented in most contexts where you’d meet other coders - but make no mistake, half the business world runs on Java, and it’s still the main language taught in a lot of CS university programs.
  • PaulRobinson 1y ago
    There are a lot of Java devs out there. At least 2 of the FAANGs are big on Java. Any big consultancy (Accenture, Cap Gemini, Fujitsu, Deloitte), is going to ship mostly Java too. I’m not a fan personally, but its easy to find devs in it, so its popular in firms where language choice is a commodity/utility
  • brabel 1y ago
    Hi I am a Java developer! Every company I ever worked at since 2008 used Java. At one point I learned many languages but still the only one that could get me a job was Java. To each their own bubble.
  • pjmlp 1y ago
    Hello there, using Java since it came out in 1996, alongside many other programming languages like C#, TypeScript, C++, SQL (PL/SQL and Transact-SQL mostly), Also Android is all about Java, even if Kotlin is the new darling and it uses its own runtime (ART), everything around it is based on the Java ecosystem, the IDE, build tools, most libraries coming out of Maven Central.
  • flohofwoe 1y ago
    Never met Android developers? I'm not sure how much Kotlin has already taken over there, but if you develop for Android you'll have to deal with Java (for better or worse). Also for backend services Java is a pretty solid option. Just compile a monolithic JAR and 'run' that anywhere, which is much more robust than some node.js app cobbled together from tens of thousands of leftpad-equivalent npm packages ;)
• ozgrakkurt 1y ago
  This looks very underwhelming considering it is on the ieee website. It is more like a low effort clickbait blogpost for ads
• bberrry 1y ago
  Those of you surprised to see Java so prominent, where have you been all your careers? 10 people startups with nodejs backends? You must have been entirely shielded from enterprise software companies.
  • 8fingerlouie 1y ago
    Java is the new COBOL. The financial sector, insurance sector, healthcare sector all jumped on Java a couple of decades ago, and they have massive repositories of Java code, and are actively migrating their COBOL code to Java.
    • osullivj 1y ago
      I've said this myself as Java's reification of mid 90s OO and poor interop via JNI are not to my taste. But I've spent 25yrs in banking with JPMC, BoA, Barclays et al. Done lots of interop with Cobol on S/390, AS/400 and VME. Never heard of any of those systems being rewritten in Java. Have encountered key mainframe prod systems for which source is lost.
      • asplake 1y ago
        I know of one investment bank (a former employer) that rewrote its mainframe-based settlement system in Java (on Linux). Front office systems were often Java (replacing Obj-C in some cases). That was two decades ago – almost a generation! Interesting to think that some of those systems would now be considered “legacy”.
        • osullivj 1y ago
          I'm guessing Swiss Bank/UBS as a mate used to trade there and had a NeXT workstation and loved Wingz. Later I heard they were doing server side pricing work on Apple servers. I stand corrected; thanks!
      • gf000 1y ago
        There are even whole companies specialized in semi-automatic migration of cobol to java.
• dvh 1y ago
  Boy those Erlang people are sure loud, I was expecting it in top 15.
  • nesarkvechnep 1y ago
    Loud and well paid, according to SO.
• librasteve 1y ago
  I see Raku has surpassed Erlang and Clojure. https://raku.org https://raku.org
  • zerr 1y ago
    Clojure is not a thing outside the HN bubble.
    • skydhash 1y ago
      All the functional programming suffers the same curse. Apart from a small set of libraries (usually standards and pure algorithms), it’s much faster to write your integration than to bring someone else version. And it’s often easy to vendor the logic you need. You won’t see the minipackages from JS/Rust world or the big libraries from C++/Java. You write something and it stays written, mostly because everyone moves the logic far away from accidental complexities, so maintainance is very low.
    • dysoco 1y ago
      I've seen certain fintechs using Clojure and I'm not even in a tech hub, I'm in South America. Not to say there are many, but definitively I've seen 0 jobs for Raku. Clojure seems more popular than other FP languages such as Haskell or even F#
  • ralphc 1y ago
    I had to look up Solidity, which I've never heard of but see is at least 10x popular. It's sole reason to exist is for Ethereum.
• Capricorn2481 1y ago
  The PHP ranking makes 0 sense. Are they...not counting websites or something?
• ksec 1y ago
  Comparing 2024 and 2025, Ruby is growing again but still on the lower end of spectrum. Both Java the language and JVM is great. A lot of the important work for JVM just landed. I am not even sure if there are anything that is really missing anymore. But the whole ecosystem is so vast I wonder if anyone would want to just craft out a subset of Java. No Zig, Crystal, Odin, but Julia and Elixir is there just without numbers.
  • zeeqeen 1y ago
    I think it is because that the application framework of Google Android is JVM. And JNI is so annoying that binding Kotlin and other system-level programming language other than C++ like Rust, Zig for a Android app is so hard. For game engine developers that works for their game targeting Android, especially for commercial mature game, you have no choice but Unity engine. And take a look at Google announce [a donation of $250,000 to the Rust Foundation](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7376353918022270976/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7376353...) but there still constraint on using Rust library for Android app.
• casey2 1y ago
  Shell is the most popular programming language I don't care what your list says, it has some 6-12 Billion users which is very impressive
  • IshKebab 1y ago
    It's not really a general purpose programming language though. (I know some people treat it as if it is, but they are idiots.)
• psychoslave 1y ago
  > AI assistance means that programmers can concern themselves less and less with the particulars of any language. Sure. Until we need to. Then we face some apparently tiny concern, which is actually deeply intricated with the rest of this whole mess, and we are ready for a ride in the rabbit hole. > most developers today don’t pay much attention to the instruction sets and other hardware idiosyncrasies of the CPUs that their code runs on, which language a program is vibe coded in ultimately becomes a minor detail. This can be very misguided from my part but I have the feeling they are two very different cases here. Ok, not everyone is a ffmpeg level champion who will thrive in code-golfing ASM til the last drop of cycle gain. But there are also probably reasons why third-generation programming language lasted without any other subsequent proposal completely displacing them. It’s all about a tradeoff of expressiveness and precision. What we want to keep in the focus zone, and what we want to delegate to mostly uncontrolled details. If to go faster we need to get rid of a transparent glasses, we will need very sound and solid alternative probes to report what’s going on ahead.
  • mattsahr 1y ago
    >> ...deeply intricated with... I think you invented a new phrase. And it's a good one!
  • louthy 1y ago
    >> most developers today don’t pay much attention to the instruction sets and other hardware idiosyncrasies of the CPUs that their code runs on, which language a program is vibe coded in ultimately becomes a minor detail. If it was even slightly true then we wouldn’t be generating language syntax at all, we’d be generating raw machine code for the chip architectures we want to support. Or even just distributing the prompts and letting an AI VM generate the target machine code later. That may well happen one day, but we’re not even close right now
    • skydhash 1y ago
      Also there’s so much patching in the kernel (for unix) to solve hardware bugs. And a lot of languages depends on C (with all its footguns) to probide that stable foundation. It’s all unseen work that are very important.
• melasadra 1y ago
  Java still so popular after all this time. I've been re-learning java using the excellent University of Helsinki's MOOC course. Was thinking of learning some spring boot and create a small project or two to reinforce what I've learned. However it feels like tutorials for spring boot is of so much lower quality compared to newer language/frameworks like JS/React/Python. Often times it's just a talking head over a powerpoint presentation talking for 30 minutes. Could people recommend me a good tutorial for spring boot (or anything java that is being used in enterprises)?
  • watwut 1y ago
    I think that java has more of a written culture then make the video culture.
  • nunobrito 1y ago
    Oh, please run away from Spring Boot. It is just the new JBoss. That is OK if you want to get inside enterprise software for a living, but that isn't the best usage for Java. My opinion: learn to create Android apps in Java. Tutorials are good and you get a new set of skills (if not already). After that, focus on learning POJO which is the fundamental knowledge in Java. Everyone writes stuff in Java/C++ where I work, but less and less Spring Boot is encouraged because of the bloat do debug and performance troubles.
  • throwaway2037 1y ago
    > I've been re-learning java using the excellent University of Helsinki's MOOC course. This sounds interesting! Can you share a link?
    • ramblerman 1y ago
      I truly don't understand this on a tech forum. You have 6000 karma, is this a bot interaction to promote votes? How does searching "Helsinki MOOC java" not immediately give you the result you are after?
      • Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
• spapas82 1y ago
  What's really interesting is the place of Elixir (below Cobol and ABAP) and more of less the same as Ada. This is very controversial when comparing it with other indexes where, for example Elixir is the most beloved programming language or the language that most people wanna use. Also compare it with the number of Elixir posts on the front page of hn. Any idea how could it be explained?
• dayvster 1y ago
  Cool but I don't know how credible this information is. From what I've read on how they got that data and came to these numbers it does not exactly inspire a high degree of confidence
• PikelEmi 1y ago
  Arduino as a programming language?
• brainzap 1y ago
  interesting how high c# is despite nothing going on, on github
  • mrsmrtss 1y ago
    That's partially attributed to the fact that .NET is a truly batteries included solution and quality of it is generally good enough that there is no need for second or third alternatives for every basic thing.
    • throwaway2037 1y ago
      I don't doubt your comment, but I immediately thought to compare to Java. Why does Java have exactly what you mention -- "second or third alternatives for every basic thing"? Is it easily explained by age as a language? Also, can you provide a concrete example of something that .NET includes in the core that Java does not?
      • metaltyphoon 1y ago
        If I were to ask you, how many APIs do you think “core” (w/e you consider core) does Java have. Think of a number before opening the link below and then let me know what you had in mind. https://apisof.net/ https://apisof.net/
      • mrsmrtss 1y ago
        Generally .NET's "out-of-the-box" experience is comparable to using Java with a framework like Spring, as it includes a built-in DI container, a modern ORM (Entity Framework), a complete web stack (ASP.NET) with the high-performance web server (Kestrel) and so on. Because these first-party tools receive strong support from both Microsoft and the community and set a very high standard, which likely reduces the incentive for third-party alternatives to emerge. Of course, there are also many quality third-party solutions, but these mostly cover areas that are not covered well by .NET. You could happily build a lot of things using only .NET, without needing any third-party dependencies.
    • brainzap 1y ago
• skor 1y ago
  compare it to 2024, why the fall of javascript? https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2024 https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2024
• gervwyk 1y ago
  Why is Yaml not on the list?
• reaperducer 1y ago
  I enjoy seeing FORTRAN and COBOL ranking above Clojure.
  • Antibabelic 1y ago
    Clojure being so low, including below Prolog of all things, is so obviously wrong.
    • ux266478 1y ago
      As a professional user of Prolog I'm feeling pretty smug over this morning's coffee.
      • a96 1y ago
        This does make me very curious about who on earth uses Prolog professionally. And happy to think that someone might :)
  • mkovach 1y ago
    Ahh, yes. In college, the CS department used Turbo Pascal (hint, I'm old). My first programming gigs out of college were FORTRAN and COBOL. It's nice to see that they are still registering. Now, time for a Metamucil and a nice nap before my standup.
• chunkyguy 1y ago
  If there is HTML in the list then why not JSON?
• latexr 1y ago
  It’s unreasonably distracting to me that the links on this webpage repeatedly (but not always) include the preceding or following space. It looks really sloppy. How do you even to that so much on a webpage, was this typed on a WYSIWYG editor?
• perfmode 1y ago
  I wish Python weren't so popular. Really miss compile-time type checking.
  • bluecalm 1y ago
    As others are pointing out here use type annotations + Mypi integrated with your IDE or CI. Imo a bigger problem with Python is that it's very slow and if that becomes a problem it's hard to solve.
    • perfmode 1y ago
      I recently discovered PyO3. can delegate to Rust libraries. I suppose it requires finding good seams
  • platevoltage 1y ago
    Me too, but thats because I absolutely hate writing it.
• aylons 1y ago
  I'm just happy that both VHDL and ADA are in the list.
  • a96 1y ago
    VHDL (or Verilog) seems like another weird entry. It's one of those description languages that feels a lot like programming, but doesn't actually produce programs.
• swiftcoder 1y ago
  Something feels off about these rankings, and comparing to lat year's stack overflow survey (albeit also potentially not a super accurate accounting), I'm left wondering if their sampling methods are at all accurate. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular-technologies-language-prof https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular... Even with a big uptick in Python and Java due to AI, I don't see Javascript+Typescript losing that much ground year-over-year.
• sega_sai 1y ago
  It is an interesting study. In terms of new languages and AI, I would like to see if anyone comes up with a more AI friendly language, as opposed to human friendly. I.e. programming languages were often designed to be easier to read/write for people, but maybe it makes sense to think of languages where it would be harder for AI to make a mistake.
• ZhadruOmjar 1y ago
  I agree that we are only going to see solidification of languages due to tools like Claude Code. Why would I take a risk on something new if I can't use a much faster tool, it can already be such a battle getting adoption in mid/large companies. I wonder how a release like React would fare if it was released in another 5-10 years once LLMs are deeply embedded.
• satiated_grue 1y ago
  Is anybody developing programming languages designed specifically as LLM "source" code targets?
• pcdoodle 1y ago
  VB6 never dies
• lunias 1y ago
  Python at number 1 makes me cringe... In my experience, Python is not a language that I would use for anything other than a script or some solo PoC. I would absolutely never use it on code expected to exceed 1000 lines, code that's maintained by more than one person, or code that takes more than a few seconds to run. Python has a lot of great libraries as a result of it being the language of choice to teach non software engineers at university. A lot of smart people contribute to the ecosystem, but I wish they would focus their efforts elsewhere. Preferably pick any complied, strongly typed, static language that supports multi-threading.
  • capyba 1y ago
    I couldn’t agree more. It feels “squishy” to me. The only statically typed, compiler languages I have a lot of familiarity with are Rust, C, and C++, and they all have different sort of warts. C with some sort of module system and the tooling of Rust would be really nice.
    • lunias 1y ago
      I'm a longtime Java dev that gets tossed on Python projects from time to time. Python for fun stuff at home is great, but in enterprise it's a waste of time. It cannot be overstated the value of compiler assisted debugging when working in a codebase that you did not write. I even find just reading code in Python difficult, when people don't use types I'm forced to interrogate stuff more closely and keep more stuff in my head (because it's explicitly not written down). People will say that, "you can use mypy for type checking." That's great, if you're working on a project where they started with that from the beginning. I'd prefer something that useful to not be optional. Even if you manage to write some super clean, type-checked Python it will still be way slower to execute than if you chose almost any compiled language. In the event that you need more performance and want to scale out (multiple core processors are kinda a thing these days) then you're forced to use a multi-process paradigm because of the GIL. People will also say, "Python is productivity gains because it's the easiest to write," but it's only the easiest to write because you know it the best.
  • platevoltage 1y ago
• phplovesong 1y ago
  PHP just seems to drop lower each year. Looks like there is little to gain from using PHP in 2025
• mmphosis 1y ago
  https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/24825595/embed https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/24825595/embed
• phplovesong 1y ago
  Is PHP including wordpress and the other ones like drupal (not sure anyone uses that garbage anymore)? If yes, then should not PHP and Python also be included as C projects?
• burnt-resistor 1y ago
  If you want to make bank, become a COBOL programmer. ;o)