Software-checking business Tiobe has ranked Python as the best programming language of 2020 because it became popular in its index than another language over the year.
Tiobe uses programming-related queries on search engines to compute its rankings which saw Python rise 2.01% over 2020 while Java fell 5%.
Regardless of Python’s star status, Tiobe’s top 5 January 2021 rankings place C at the top, followed by Java, then Python, C++ and C#.
According to Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen, Python’s versatility, high productivity and how easy it is to learn is what makes it so popular among enterprise software engineers. However, what is keeping Python from first place is the fact that C has a better performance.
‘Python is popping up everywhere. It started as a competitor of Perl to write scripts for system administrators a long time ago’, Jansen notes.
‘Nowadays, it is the favorite language in fields such as data science and machine learning, but it is also used for web development and back-end programming and growing into the mobile application domain and even in (larger) embedded systems’.
Jansen foresees that the question of performance will prevent it from becoming the top language in a number of years to come.
He also predicts that Python will soon overtake Java’s second place position.
Although Java was in second position this month, Python overtook Java in Tiobe’s November rankings. It was the first time in over two decades since Tiobe has tracked language popularity and Java and C weren’t the most popular two. It was found that Java fell by almost 5% over last year.
Julia, a growing programming language in data science and machine-learning fields is expected to become a top 20 language in 2021.
Julia became available in 2012 but made it into Tiobe’s top 50 in August 2018. She was created for jobs in scientific computing, machine learning, data mining, large-scale linear algebra, distributed and parallel computing. It aims to have the speed of C but also to good enough for general programming like Python.
However, some software engineers believe that Python doesn’t properly attend to developers who build browser applications and mobile applications in such a manner that JavaScript or Microsoft’s type safety take on JavaScript, TypeScript do.
Currently, Java ranks 7th on Tiobe’s index. However, it is the top programming language on developer analyst firm RedMonk’s latest popularity rankings. TypeScript is 42nd on Tiobe, but 9th on RedMonk.
It was also noted by Tiobe that specialist statistical language R rose from 18th to 9th position over the past year.
By Marvellous Iwendi
Source: ZDNet