I was reading this article about Xamarin and Swift when I noticed this useful piece of information at the end:

If Swift continues to take the iOS world by storm, more such documentation may be needed. The February 2020 TIOBE Index, which measures programming language popularity, shows Swift at No. 10, having moved up a full 10 positions from the February 2019 ranking, making it the biggest mover in the top 20. C#, used for Xamarin coding, is at No. 5, moving up from No. 7 last year.

Interesting. That bit of info led me to this, the TIOBE Index.

The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system.

I see this as a very useful tool for software developers, not just in figuring out what programming language to use when building a new application, but also in figuring out what programming language to learn or focus on to improve your career as a software developer.

I'm glad to see C# making its way up on the list. I thought Python would be on top, but I guess Java is still too popular nowadays. Also, I keep reading about Rust in the dev blogs/websites that I follow. I wonder when it will break into the Top 20 list? Either way, I think this index is a good list to keep our eyes on as software developers.

Tags: #Bookmarks #ProgrammingLanguages

Discuss... or leave a comment below.