Java moves up to third place in the TIOBE ranking as Dart joins the top twenty for the first time

Java has passed C++ in TIOBE's November index and now sits in third place, behind Python and C. That is according to the monthly ranking by the Dutch company TIOBE, which roughly reflects how often programming languages are searched for online. Java scores 8.89 percent, while C++ slips to 8.35 percent. Python remains by far the number one with 20.86 percent, although it has lost 2.51 percentage points in a year, byteiota reports.

A striking riser is Dart, which jumps from 26th to 20th place. According to TIOBE, this is mainly down to Flutter, Google's framework for building apps for several platforms from a single codebase. R and SQL also enter the top ten as Visual Basic drops two places.

At the bottom of the top ten, Go takes tenth place with 1.69 percent, just ahead of Rust with 1.63 percent. According to byteiota, this is the first time since July that Rust has fallen out of the top ten, even though the language is actually gaining ground year on year. The gap is so small that the order could flip again in December. The index measures popularity through search engines and says nothing about how much code is actually written in a language.