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On 15th Anniversary, Go Programming Languages Rises in Popularity

The Tiobe index tries to track the popularity of programming languages by counting the number of search results for the language's name followed by the word "programming" (on 25 different search engines). And this month there were some surprises... By TIOBE's reckoning, compared to a year ago PHP has now fallen from #7 to #12, while Delphi/Object Pascal shot up five spots from #16 to #11. In that same year, Fortran jumped from #12 to #8 — while both Visual Basic and SQL dropped down a single rank. Toward the top of the list, C actually fell from the #2 spot over the last 12 months to the #4 spot. And Go just reached the #7 rank on the TIOBE's ranking of programming language popularity — "an all time high for Go," according to TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen. In this month's note, he explains what he thinks is unusual about this — starting by saying that Go programs are both fast, and easy in many ways — easy to deploy, easy to learn, and easy to understand. Python for instance is easy to learn but not fast, and deployment for larger Python programs is fragile due to dependencies on all kind of versioned libraries in the environment. If compared to Rust for instance (another contender for a top position), Go is a tiny bit slower, but the Go programs are much easier to understand. The next hurdle for Go in the TIOBE index is JavaScript at position #6. That will be a tough one to pass. JavaScript is ubiquitous in software development, although for larger JavaScript systems we see a shift to TypeScript nowadays. "If annual trends continue this way, Go will bypass JavaScript within 3 years," TIOBE's CEO predicts. (Adding "Let's see what the future has in store for Go...") Although the Go team actually has specific plans for the future, according to a blog post this week celebrating Go's 15th anniversary: We're working on making Go better for AI — and AI better for Go — by enhancing Go's capabilities in AI infrastructure, applications, and developer assistance. Go is a great language for building production systems, and we want it to be a great language for building production AI systems, too... For AI applications, we will continue building out first-class support for Go in popular AI SDKs, including LangChainGo and Genkit. And from its very beginning, Go aimed to improve the end-to-end software engineering process, so naturally we're looking at bringing the latest tools and techniques from AI to bear on reducing developer toil, leaving more time for the fun stuff — like actually programming! TIOBE's top 10 programming language rankings for the month of November: Python C++ Java C C# JavaScript Go Fortran Visual Basic SQL