C++ — programming language of the year 2022. What about other languages?

20 Jan 2023

Author: Sergey Vasiliev

Overtaking Python, C++ became the TIOBE's language of 2022. It outscored Rust, C#, Go and others by a large margin. Don't you find this weird? Well, let's figure this out.

The rating we're talking about is based on the TIOBE index. Here's the table of the 20 most popular languages for January 2023:

Here's the main question: why is C++ the language of 2022? According to the table, Python takes the first place in the rating.

Here's the answer: TIOBE chose the winner by the growth of the language popularity. In this regard, C++ is ahead of the curve.

Here's the top five leaders in popularity growth:

C++ (+4.62 %)
C (+3.82 %)
Python (+2.78 %)
Java (+1.55 %)
JavaScript (+0.78 %)

TIOBE gives several reasons explaining C++'s growing popularity. Although C++ is an OOP language, it provides excellent performance. Moreover, ISO constantly releases new standards. TIOBE points out that the language started going uphill since the C++11 publication. They also suppose that C++20 which introduced modules will probably lift C++ further in the TIOBE index in the next few years.

Here are a few more curious results from the TIOBE index:

Rust entered the Top 20 again (from #26 to #18);
F# jumped from position #74 to #33;
Lua jumped 6 positions from #30 to #24;
Kotlin jumped from #29 to #25.

Here are some thoughts that crossed my mind after viewing the table and reading the article:

Visual Basic takes position #6 — wait, what?! It's amusing to compare the absolute rating of VB (4.64%) with Go (1.14%) and Rust (0.61%).
It's a pity that C# gets only +0.05%. That's a scanty increase (especially when comparing it with Java).
I feel happy for F# — it made a great jump!
Some people are skeptical about TIOBE ratings because of the way they calculate the popularity of languages. And that's a fair point. The Visual Basic position in this index kind of suggests that their algorithm of choosing a language is not perfect. Well, perhaps C# has actually become more popular, who knows.
As Bjarne Stroustrup said: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."
In case you're curious to learn about the most interesting bugs in projects written on different programming languages, here you are:
- Top 10 bugs found in C# projects in 2022
- Top 10 bugs found in C++ projects in 2022

What are your thoughts on the rating?