SQL and Assembly Language In Decline In TIOBE Index
Monday, 09 June 2025

This month's TIOBE Index is out and the headline asks the question "Where is SQL Going?" Its chart provides the answer of "down", a fate that also applied to Assembly Language. The language that is most on the "up" is Ada.

tiobec june 25

Comparing one TIOBE Top 10 chart with another is a challenge for those who like spot-the-difference puzzles. However, if you eyeball this one and its counterpart from three months ago, March 2025 (see here), it doesn't require much skill to notice that one very distinctive line is missing.

SQL TC

SQL has dropped out of the chart and is currently at #12 in the ranking. But why the long straight line? Here is Paul Jansen's explanation:

SQL has a remarkable history in the TIOBE index. When the TIOBE index started in 2001, SQL was one of the 20 languages that were tracked. It was a serious top 10 player at that time. In the beginning of 2004, somebody noted that SQL was not a programming language. After lots of debates, it was decided to take SQL from the list. It was in 2018 that somebody else pointed out to us that SQL is Turing complete, albeit in a tricky way. And if you are Turing complete, you are considered to be a programming language. Hence, as of that moment SQL was readded to the TIOBE index and, since databases and SQL go hand in hand, SQL became a top 10 player again.

Jansen also has an explanation of why SQL might be in decline due to the increasing predominance of AI: 

However, in the booming field of AI, where data is usually unstructured, NoSQL databases are often a better fit. NoSQL has become a serious threat for the well-defined but rather static SQL approach. NoSQL's popularity is comparable to the rise of dynamically typed languages such as Python if compared to well-defined statically typed programming languages such as C++ and Java.

Looking at the Top 20 table this month the other language showing a slump is Assembly language:

ass lang TC

 

Assembly language isn't a single entity as it is machine-dependent, but refers instead to low-level programming that has a very strong, nearly one-to-one correspondence with the machine code instructions that a CPU can execute directly. Advancements in optimizing compilers mean that languages like C, C++, Rust and even Java with JIT compilation can often generate machine code that is nearly as efficient as, or in some cases even more efficient than, hand-written assembly for general-purpose tasks, which diminishes one of the primary historical advantages of assembly.

The language whose curve has the steepest and most sustained increase since the beginning of the year is Ada:

ada TC

Despite being an "oldie", Ada is now at its highest ever position, #11, in the index, hot on the heels of Fortran and Delphi Pascal, all 20th century languages. For a discussion of these languages, see Languages That Stand The Test Of Time.

tiobesq

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TIOBE Index

Related Articles

Languages That Stand The Test Of Time  

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Last Updated ( Monday, 09 June 2025 )