Top 20 Programming Languages October 2026: Who’s Rising and Who’s Falling

Julia returns to the TIOBE top 20

After being tipped last month, Julia has officially climbed back into the TIOBE top 20 — a threshold it had not reached in three years. This is the most prominent shift in October’s edition of the ranking, which tracks programming language popularity among developers on a monthly basis. Despite losing more than five percentage points year-over-year, Python remains well ahead of its rivals, with C and C++ following.

What explains Julia’s renewed momentum, after its brief appearance in the top 20 in summer 2023 and its rapid drop back out? Paul Jansen offers an explanation: the rising interest in Julia largely stems from demand for modern languages that combine high performance with ease of learning, especially for numerical computing. The TIOBE Software CEO says Julia aims to offer Python-like accessibility while delivering performance closer to C++, a combination that could help it sustain growth. Beyond Julia, Jansen also points to two other languages that may soon challenge for a top-20 spot: Dart and OCaml, which climbed 14 and 12 positions this month to land at ranks 27 and 26 respectively.

The top 20 programming languages in October 2026

Elsewhere in the list, several languages are making gains. R jumped five places to sit at number 8, while Rust rose from 16th to 10th. Swift also made a significant advance, moving from 22nd to 14th, and COBOL climbed seven positions. On the flip side, Delphi/Object Pascal suffered the steepest fall of the month: previously ranked 9th a year ago, it has tumbled to 19th.

Here are the 20 programming languages developers favored in October 2026:

1. Python (= position unchanged from October 2025)
2. C (=)
3. C++ (=)
4. Java (=)
5. C# (=)
6. JavaScript (=)
7. Visual Basic (=)
8. R (+5)
9. SQL (+1)
10. Rust (+6)
11. Go (-3)
12. PHP (+2)
13. Fortran (-2)
14. Swift (+8)
15. Scratch (+3)
16. COBOL (+7)
17. Perl (-5)
18. Julia (+12)
19. Delphi/Object Pascal (-10)
20. MATLAB (-3)

See the full ranking

How the TIOBE index ranks languages

Since 2001, the TIOBE index has published a monthly measure of programming language popularity among developers. Its approach is straightforward: it counts the number of queries for each language across roughly twenty search engines and platforms, including Google, Wikipedia and Amazon. TIOBE cautions that a language’s place in the index does not indicate its intrinsic quality nor the total volume of code written in it. Still, developers and organizations can use the index as a barometer to keep skills up to date or to guide a strategic choice about which language to adopt when starting a new project.