Redazione RHC : 17 September 2025 07:21
TIOBE Software has released its September ranking of the most popular programming languages. The highlight of the publication was Perl’s return to the top 10, jumping from 27th to 10th place.
Just a year ago, Perl was considered an “outsider,” but now its index is 2.03%. For comparison, it was 2.08% in August and 1.76% in July. This growth is particularly remarkable considering that during Perl’s “golden years” it rose to third place in the rankings (March 2005), only to decline for decades.
According to TIOBE director Paul Jansen, the technical explanation for this increase lies in the large number of Perl books available on Amazon: there are four times as many books on Perl as on PHP, and seven times as many books on Rust. However, the real reasons for this increase remain unclear.
Jansen himself suggests that the community is increasingly adopting Perl 5 as the “mainstream” language. The history of Perl 6, later renamed Raku, lasted nearly two decades and led to a slowdown in Perl 5 development. Many developers then switched to Python. Today, Perl 6/Raku ranks only 129th in the index and has virtually no impact on the industry, while Perl 5 is receiving regular updates and is regaining attention.
In September, Python retained its top spot with 25.98% (up 5.81% year-over-year). C++ remained in second place (8.8%), followed by C (8.65%) and Java (8.35%). C# also entered the top five (6.38%). JavaScript remains in sixth place (3.22%), followed by Visual Basic (2.84%) and Go (2.32%). Delphi/Object Pascal rose to ninth place (2.26%), followed by Perl. SQL, Fortran, and PHP, however, have lost ground.
Other notable changes includeincreasing interest in Ada (14th place, up 12 spots) and R (13th place, up 2 spots). Rust, MATLAB, and Kotlin have lost ground.
The TIOBE ranking is updated monthly andreflects the popularity of languages based on search queries on Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Bing, and over 20 other services. It does not rank the “best” language or the volume of code written, but rather serves as an indicator of skill relevance and a guide for strategic development decisions.
Historical data highlights long-term trends: Python has consistently occupied one of the top 3 spots since 2020, C and C++ have held the top spot for over three decades, and languages like Delphi/Object Pascal and Ada are making a surprising comeback after a long hiatus.
The Hall of Fame rankings remind us that Python has been named “language of the year” the most often, eight times since 2007. But C, Java, and even Go have also stood out over the years. years.
The index authors emphasize that they are continuing to refine the calculation methodology. They plan to expand the list of search languages (for example, to include Baidu Chinese) and introduce separate indexes for databases and frameworks.
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