PowerShell swims into the TIOBE 50

Here at JAXenter, we like to keep track of the latest trends for programming languages. A month hardly goes by without a check in with the TIOBE Index to keep track of who’s rising, who’s falling, and who is just chilling. The TIOBE Programming Community index charts the popularity of various programming languages, showing what’s still popular among developers.

Even in the cold, wet of late winter/early spring, things are stirring on the TIOBE Index. Here’s the top twenty list for March 2019.

The TIOBE Index for March 2019. Source.

PowerShell swims into the top fifty

To be perfectly honest, there’s not much change from last month to this month. Possibly everyone is sad about the rainy spring weather? It’s just that time of the year, even for programming languages. The biggest thing to happen has been PowerShell’s quiet rise into the top fifty.

PowerShell is a relatively old scripting language from Microsoft. Designed for task automation and configuration management, this framework has seen its fortunes rises and fall on the TIOBE Index before. However, interest resurged last year as it was re-released as PowerShell Core, an open source, cross-platform framework designed for heterogeneous environments and the hybrid cloud.

PowerShell Core works well with existing tools. It’s optimized for structured data like JSON, REST APIs, and object models. Features include a command-line shell, an associated scripting language, and a framework for processing cmdlets.

It’s interesting to see that open sourcing a framework like PowerShell Core has had such an impact. There are a lot of smaller languages that TIOBE tracks, so it’s pretty significant for one to claw its way up. Especially since it’s a scripting language! We’ll keep our eyes on this one in the future.

SEE ALSO: Command line tools for developers

There aren’t many other changes this month when we look at the rest of the TIOBE Index. Java, C, and Python continue to dominate the top 10. There are minimal changes here, as a few languages swap spots.

The real interesting stuff is in the top 20. Groovy continues to do well, shaking and sliding another few slots upwards. Other winners include MATLAB and R, which isn’t surprising. These scientific languages generally do well.

However, there are some notable declines. Swift has continued to tumble precipitously, down seven spots this month. Go is joining it near the bottom of the top 20. What’s going on here? We’ll have to see if this is just a mid-winter depression or a sign of something more serious. As usual, Perl and Ruby are on their slow fall, while Visual Basic is just excited to be here.

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