While C# fell short of Tiobe’s Programming Language of the Year honors for 2022, Tiobe expects the Microsoft-built object-oriented, type-safe language to snag the honor for 2023. Tiobe will announce the winning programming language in January.

Tiobe gives Programming Language of the Year honors to the language with the most growth year over year in its popularity index. At the end of 2022, it appeared C# would take the title. However, C++ overtook C# in the final month, growing by 4.62 percentage points.

“This year we are a bit surer that C# is going to win. It gained +2.38% in one year, whereas its closest contenders Fortran and F# only gained +0.64% and +0.48% respectively,” Tiobe said in its December bulletin. In fact, most of the top 20 languages lost popularity in 2023, whereas the gainers typically come from lower in the chart. Tiobe describes this as the long tale, where small languages reside.

Why the uptick for C#? Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen believes the language is attracting Java developers. “I think that Java developers are moving to C# and Kotlin because these languages are more expressive and have no license issues.”

Software quality services company Tiobe bases its monthly popularity index on a formula that assesses the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses, and third-party vendors for each language, using search engines such as Bing, Google, and Yahoo.

The Tiobe top 10 for December 2023:

1. Python, with a rating of 13.86%
2. C, 11.44%
3. C++, 10.01%
4. Java, 7.99%
5. C#, 7.3%
6. JavaScript, 2.9%
7. PHP, 2.01%
8. Visual Basic, 2.82%
9. SQL, 1.61%
10. Assembly, 1.11%

The rival Pypl Index of Language Popularity gauges language popularity based on how often language tutorials are searched on in Google.

The Pypl top 10 for December 2023:

1. Python, with a share of 28.09%
2. Java, 15.81%
3. JavaScript, 8.93%
4. C/C++, 6.8%
5. C#, 6.84%
6. PHP, 4.6%
7. R, 4.53%
8. TypeScript, 2.81%
9. Swift, 2.8%
10. Objective-C, 2.33%