C++ Experiences Comeback In TIOBE Index

Written by Janet Swift

Friday, 19 April 2019

C++ is singled out for attention in this month's TIOBE Index. Having been pushed out of the top three programming languages by Python last September, it has returned to its long term third position, relegating Python to fourth.

The TIOBE Programming Community Index started in 2002 as as an indicator of the popularity of programming languages, it uses a very simple methodology. It counts hits for the search query:

tiobesearch

on 25 search engines - including many Google sites, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo, Wikipedia and, somewhat bizarrely, Ebay. Although Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.in are among the 25, Amazon.com is not.

The index is published on a monthly basis and its interactive Top 10 Chart provides the overall trends over its entire history. Here we've selected the current Top 4:

tiobeapril4

The green line represents C++ and, like C, has experienced an uptick over recent months.

The year-on-year figures are also presented every month. These reveal that Java, which has been in the top position since May 2015 when it overtook C, which had occupied the top slot for most of the previous three years, was the only language in the top 4 to have seen a decline (of 0.74%) in its market share since last April. Python had experienced the biggest year-on-year increase (2.36%) of any language in the index, followed by C++ (1.62%)

tiobeapril4tab

TIOBE takes pains to point out that C++ re-occupying 3rd place in the index isn't due to any reduction in the popularity of Python:

"This is certainly not because Python is in decline: Python is scoring all-time highs almost every month. It is just that C++ is also getting more and more popular."

Reflecting on C++'s performance over the longer term and analyzing the reasons for its resurgence, TIOBE writes:

C++ is still far away from its popularity in the beginning of this century when it had a market share of more than 15%. The complexity and the delay of releasing the new language definition C++0x pulled the language back at that time. That new language standard, eventually named C++11 after its release in 2011, has made the language much simpler, safer and more expressive at the same time. It took some extra years before the C++11 standard was adopted because the community had to wait for proper compiler support. But now that the C++11, C++14 and C++17 standards are supported by the most important C++ compilers, i.e. Gcc, Clang and Visual Studio, the popularity of C++ is reviving.

Earlier this month we reported on a new C++ Nanodegree From Udacity whose promotional material outlines the way in which C++ is at the heart of many complex high performance systems and is the common thread between self-driving cars, drones and robotics - emerging technologies that offer developers well-remunerated employment opportunities. Udacity also co-opted Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++ to encourage sign-ups to the 5-month series of courses. Stroustrup explains that C++ is used for the "foundational parts" of many areas of programming - from games to AI saying:

"It sticks in between the higher-level software and the hardware and that's a much bigger part of the world that most people think. It's basically everywhere."

All-in-all C++ deserves to be recognized for doing well in the TIOBE Index this month and is a language that has a future as well as a past.

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More Information

TIOBE Index

Python Language Of The Year

C Slides In TIOBE Index

Language Ranking Almost Unchanged Over Time

TIOBE Index - Top 10 Languages Slump

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Last Updated ( Friday, 19 April 2019 )

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