Kotlin, the Java language alternative from JetBrains, has made its way into the top 20 in Tiobe’s monthly index of programming language popularity.

The just-published September 2023 edition of the Tiobe Programming Community index has Kotlin ranking 20th, with a .90% rating. It is believed to be the first time Kotlin has ever ranked so high in the index, notwithstanding its surging popularity in 2017, when Google declared Kotlin a first-class language and viable alternative to Java for Android development. Tiobe’s popularity ranking is based on a formula that assesses the number of engineers, courses, and third-party vendors related to each language, derived from popular search engines.

Kotlin’s rise traces many years of steady growth of the Kotlin community. Today, Kotlin is a “fierce” competitor to Java, according to software quality services vendor Tiobe. “The main argument against Kotlin is that Java is a more established language thus having more programmers, books, training courses, libraries, etc,” Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen said. “Let’s see whether Kotlin can keep its top 20 position the next few months.”

Elsewhere in the Tiobe index this month, the Julia language, which reached the top 20 for the first time last month, dropped back to 25th.

The Tiobe top 10 for September 2023:

1. Python, with a rating of 14.16%
2. C, 11.27%
3. C++, 10.65%
4. Java, 9.49%
5. C#, 7.31%
6. JavaScript, 3.3%
7. Visual Basic, 2.22%
8. PHP 55%
9. Assembly language, 1.53%
10. SQL, 1.44%

The alternative Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index assesses how often language tutorials are searched in Google. The Pypl top 10 for September 2023:

1. Python, with a 27.99% share
2. Java, 15.9%
3. JavaScript, 9.36%
4. C#, 6.67%
5. C/C++, 6.54%
6. PHP, 4.91%
7. R, 4.4%
8. TypeScript, 3.04%
9. Swift, 2.64%
10. Objective-C, 2.15%