It’s important to keep track of ongoing trends for programming languages. How else will we know what’s hot and what’s not? So, a monthly visit to the TIOBE Index is a great way to keep an eye on the moving and grooving of all those programming languages. The TIOBE Programming Community index charts the popularity of various programming languages, showing what’s still popular among developers.
Here’s the top twenty list for February 2019.
The TIOBE index for February 2019. Source: www.tiobe.com.
Groovy’s electric slide back into the top twenty
It’s been a while since the TIOBE index has been this psychedelic. Groovy sashayed into the top twenty back in 2016, only to be outshone by other programming languages. Now, Groovy is back, baby, and trippier than ever at #19.
This dynamic language has been dancing around the JVM for solid 15 years. It gained fans and TIOBE notoriety thanks to Jenkins, a popular continuous integration tool. Many popular scripts for Jenkins are written in Groovy, so as the CI/CD architecture took off, so too did Groovy usage. Jenkins isn’t the only one grooving along; the build system Gradle utilizes Groovy for its scripting.
Groovy 2.5 arrived in the middle of last year with a whole bunch of upgrades for developers to enjoy. The biggest improvement was definitely support for macros that let you use Groovy syntax directly when creating compile-time metaprogramming extensions.
It’ll be exciting to see if Groovy can maintain this kind of speed on the dance floor as 2019 continues.
SEE ALSO: Top 5 IDEs and text editors for Groovy
In other TIOBE news, Hack made the top 50. We haven’t spent much time on this programming language before, but it promises to bring together the fast development cycle of a dynamically typed language with the discipline of static typing.
The top ten remains the same from last month: Java remains supreme, with C and Python nipping at its heels. Some languages are on the up: Objective-C and Perl are on the rise. It’s surprising to see a slight resurgence of scripting languages. Much like fashion, tech trends definitely run in cycles.
As some rise, others must fall: R, Ruby, Go, and Swift are declining slightly. TypeScript has taken a bit of a dive as well. Only time will tell if these changes are a permanent trend or just statistical noise.
SQL joined the TIOBE chart this time last year after it became Turing complete. Now, it seems to be holding its position steady at the middle of the pack – this month coming in at #11.
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Source : JAXenter
