The world’s top programming languages since 1986
While a large part of today’s workforce were either not born or too young to use a computer, 1986 saw multiple programming languages being tracked by the Tiobe Index.
The index ranks the popularity of programming languages, tracking the growth and decline of languages over the years.
“The Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages,” said Tiobe.
Its historical ranking shows that in 1986, C was the most popular language. It was followed by Ada and Lisp.
The table below shows how the top languages have fared since 1986 to today.
| Programming Language | 1986 | 1991 | 1996 | 2001 | 2006 | 2011 | 2016 |
| Java | – | – | 15 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| C | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| C++ | 5 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| C# | – | – | – | 10 | 6 | 5 | 4 |
| Python | – | – | 24 | 23 | 7 | 6 | 5 |
| PHP | – | – | – | 8 | 4 | 4 | 6 |
| JavaScript | – | – | 19 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 7 |
| Visual Basic .NET | – | – | – | – | – | 28 | 8 |
| Perl | – | – | 3 | 4 | 5 | 8 | 9 |
| Ruby | – | – | – | 31 | 17 | 10 | 10 |
| Lisp | 3 | 4 | 7 | 15 | 12 | 12 | 27 |
| Ada | 2 | 5 | 6 | 16 | 15 | 16 | 28 |
| Pascal | 6 | 3 | 4 | 13 | 16 | 14 | 74 |
“The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers worldwide, 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 index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.”
The system used to calculate the ranking is detailed here.
Now read: These programming languages have shown big growth in the past 5 years
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