A boom in machine-learning applications continues to drive up the popularity of 27-year-old Python, so much that it could soon outrank 33-year-old C++ on TIOBE’s programming language index.

Python’s rise on the new TIOBE index results for August lines up with past results from Stack Overflow, a site that helps programmers solve coding questions, which last year found that growth in Python-tagged questions may have made it the fastest-growing language.

IEEE’s app for rating the most popular languages has had Python in top spot since 2017 where it remains today, as it does on PyPl. Developer analyst RedMon places Python in third spot.

But on TIOBE’s index, Python has never reached third spot. It has risen from fifth to fourth place since August 2017 with a current rating of 6.992 percent, just behind C++’s 7.471 percent rating.

TIOBE analysts believe that Python’s running on large embedded systems will likely see it take third spot at some point soon, and even overtake Java, its current top-placed language.

They also note that Hack, Groovy, and Julia entered the top 50 while the Microsoft-maintained TypeScript dropped out of the top 50.

The top 10 in descending order are Java, C, C++, Python, Visual Basic .NET, C#, PHP, JavaScript, SQL, and Assembly language.

TIOBE bases its programming language popularity index on a range of search-engine queries, mostly from Google’s various international sites, but also Wikipedia, Bing, Baidu, Amazon, and YouTube.

In other words, the rankings don’t necessarily reflect the quality of a language or how many lines of code have been written in it.

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August 7, 2018

by Liam Tung