Our Top Programming Languages interactive tries to sort out the issue of estimating a language’s reputation by in search of proxy alerts. We do that by establishing measures of recognition from a wide range of knowledge sources that we consider are good proxies for lively curiosity for every programming language. In complete, we establish 64 programming languages. We then weight every knowledge supply to create an overall index of popularity, excluding a number of the lowest scorers. Beneath, we describe the sources of knowledge we use to get the measures, and the weighting scheme we use to supply the general indices.
By reputation, we imply we are attempting to rank languages which can be in lively use, together with exercise from sustaining legacy methods. We take a look at three totally different features of recognition: languages in lively use amongst typical IEEE members and dealing software engineers (the “Spectrum” rating), languages which can be in demand by employers (the “Jobs” rating), and languages which can be within the zeitgeist (the “Trending” rating).
We gauged the recognition of languages utilizing the next sources for a complete of seven metrics (see beneath). We gathered the knowledge for all metrics in July—August 2025. Up to now we relied closely on APIs to collect knowledge from sources, however now the information is gathered manually to the issue of maintaining with API adjustments and terminations, and as a result of lots of the programming language’s names (C++, Scheme) collided with widespread phrases present in analysis papers and job adverts or have been troublesome for a search engine to parse. When numerous search outcomes made it impractical to resolve ambiguities by analyzing the entire outcomes individually, we used a pattern of every knowledge supply, and decided the related pattern measurement based mostly on estimating the true imply with 95 % confidence. Not all knowledge sources include data for every programming language and we interpret this data because the programming language having “no hits” (that’s, not being fashionable).
The outcomes from every metric are normalized to supply a relative reputation rating between 0 and 1. Then the person metrics are multiplied by a weight issue, mixed, and the outcome renormalized to supply an combination reputation rating.In aggregating metrics, we hope to compensate for statistical quirks which may distort a language’s reputation rating in any explicit supply of knowledge. Various the load components permits us to create the totally different outcomes for the Spectrum, Jobs, and Trending rankings. We totally acknowledge that, whereas these weights are subjective, they’re based mostly on our understanding of the sources and our prior protection of software program matters. Various the load components permits us to emphasise various kinds of reputation and produce the totally different rankings. We then mixed every weighted knowledge supply for every program after which renormalized the ensuing frequency to supply an combination reputation rating.
The Prime Programming Languages was initially created by knowledge journalist Nick Diakopoulos. Our statistical methodology advisor is Hilary Wething, though all of the precise knowledge gathering and calculation is carried out by us. Rankings are computed utilizing R.
Google is the main search engine on the earth, making it a perfect match for estimating language reputation. We measured the variety of hits for every language by looking out on the template, “X programming language” (with citation marks) and manually recorded the variety of outcomes that have been returned by the search. We took the measurement in July 2025. We like this measure as a result of it signifies the quantity of on-line data sources about every programming language.
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow is a well-liked website the place programmers can ask questions on coding. We recorded the variety of questions tagged to every program inside the final week previous to our search (August 2025). For the Mathematica/Wolfram language, we relied on the sister “Stack” for the Mathematica platform and tallied the variety of programming-related questions requested up to now week. These knowledge have been gathered manually. This measure signifies what programming languages are at present trending.
IEEE maintains a digital library with thousands and thousands of convention and journal articles masking a wide selection of scientific and engineering disciplines. We looked for journal, journal, and early entry articles that point out every of the languages within the template “X programming” for the 2025 year-to-date. For search outcomes that returned hundreds of articles, we recognized the proper pattern measurement for a 95 % confidence interval (normally a bit of over 300) and pulled that variety of articles. For every language we sampled, we recognized the share of articles that make the most of the programming language after which multiplied the full variety of articles by this share to tally the doubtless complete variety of articles that reference a given programming language. We performed this search in August 2025. This metric captures the prevalence of the totally different programming languages as used and referenced in engineering scholarship.
IEEE Jobs Site
We measured the demand for different programming languages in job postings on the IEEE Job Site. For search outcomes that returned hundreds of listings, we recognized the proper pattern measurement for a 95 % confidence interval (normally round 300 outcomes) and pulled that variety of job listings to manually look at. For every language we sampled, we recognized the share of listings that make the most of the programming language after which multiplied the full variety of job listings by this share to tally the doubtless complete variety of job listings that reference a given programming language. Moreover, as a result of a number of the languages we monitor may very well be ambiguous in plain textual content—resembling Go, J, Ada, and R—we looked for job postings with these phrases within the job description after which manually examined the outcomes, once more sampling entries if the variety of outcomes was massive. The search was performed in August 2025. We just like the IEEE Job Website for its massive variety of non-U.S. listings, making it a perfect to measure international reputation.
Profession Builder
We measured the demand for various programming languages on the CareerBuilder job website. We looked for “Developer” jobs supplied inside the United States, as that is the preferred job title for programmers. We sampled 400 job adverts and manually examined them to establish which languages employers talked about within the postings. The search was performed in August 2024. We just like the profession builder website to establish the recognition of programmer jobs amongst U.S.-based firms
GitHub is a public repository for a lot of volunteer-driven open-source software program tasks. We used Github’s listing of it’s high 50 programming languages, filtering out entries for issues like Docker configuration scripts. The info cowl the primary quarter of 2025. This measured supplies a robust indication what languages coders select to work in once they have a private selection.
Trinity School Dublin Library
The library of Trinity College Dublin is one in all six authorized deposit libraries in Ireland and the United Kingdom. A duplicate have to be deposited with the library of any printed materials revealed or distributed in Eire, and on request any U.Ok. writer or distributor should additionally deposit a e-book. We looked for all books revealed within the yr so far that matched the names of programming languages and checked the outcomes for false positives. The search was performed in July 2025. We like this library assortment as a result of it represents a big and categorized pattern of works, primarily within the English language.
Discord
Discord is fashionable chat-room platform the place many programmers alternate data. We counted the variety of tags that correspond to every language. Within the case of languages that may be names of nonprogramming matters (many nonprogramming-related matters even have devoted Discord servers; for instance, “Julia” might check with the programming language or the Sesame Street puppet), outcomes have been manually examined. Disboard was searched in August 2025. Disboard lists many public discord servers and lots of younger coders use the location, contributing a special demographic of coders.
