Go language hits top 10 in the Tiobe index

Google’s Go language, or golang, has reached its highest position ever in the Tiobe language popularity index. The language, now in the eighth ranked position for language popularity, has been on the rise for several years.

Go, which is probably best known as the language used to develop Docker and Kubernetes, climbed to the top 10 in the Tiobe index a year ago, but its current position is the highest ever.

Paul Jansen, CEO of Tiobe, recalled how Go scaled the Tiobe index after being announced by Google in November 2009, winning Tiobe’s Language of the Year award. That award goes to the language that has gained the most popularity in a given year, but in the case of Go, the popularity was short-lived. “Unexpectedly, the hype was over soon. In 2015, Go hit position #122 in the TIOBE index and all seemed lost,” Jansen said.

“One year later, Go adopted a very strict ‘half-a-year’ releasee cycle—backed up by Google. Every new release, Go improved.” Jansen noted that Docker and Kubernetes seemed to improve in parallel. “Nowadays, Go is used in many software fields such as back-end programming, web services and APIs,” added Jansen.

Jansen said he expects Go to stay in index’s top 10 for a long time to come. Go 1.22, featuring changes to for loops, was released February 7.

The Tiobe index gauges language popularity using a formula that assesses the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors for each language, based on searches of Google, Bing, Wikipedia, and other websites.

Elsewhere in the February release of Tiobe’s index, Google’s Carbon language, positioned as a successor to C++, reached the top 100 for the first time. The overall top 10 for the index this month is as follows:

1. Python, with a rating of 15.16%
2. C, 10.97%
3. C++, 10.53%
4. Java, 8.88%
5. C#, 7.53%
6. JavaScript, 3.17%
7. SQL, 1.82%
8. Go, 1.73%
9. Visual Basic, 1.52%
10. PHP, 1.51%

In the rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index, which assesses language popularity based on how often language tutorials are searched on in Google, the top 10 for this month is as follows:

1. Python, with a 28.11% share
2. Java, 15.52%
3. JavaScript, 8.57%
4. C/C++, 6.92%
5. C#, 6.73%
6. R, 4.75%
7. PHP, 4.57%
8. TypeScript, 2.78%
9. Swift, 2.75%
10. Objective-C, 2.37%