Revisiting Popular Programming Languages: The 2026 Edition

As always, this ranking of the Top 10 popular open source programming languages is based on four other rankings. A new entrant this year is Rust.

- Dr. Deepu Benson

Over the past decade, I have contributed three articles to Open Source For You (OSFY) focusing on the ranking of popular programming languages. The first article on this subject, titled '10 Most Popular Programming Languages', was published in 2017. It is a difficult as well as controversial task to rank programming languages for popularity or usefulness. So, rather than depending on a single ranking, I considered the four most popular rankings of programming languages: the RedMonk programming language ranking, the PYPL (Popularity of Programming Language Index) ranking, the IEEE Spectrum ranking of programming languages, and the TIOBE index. The article is available online on the OSFY portal at https://www.opensourceforu.com/2017/03/most-popular-programming-languages/. My top 10 list of programming languages that year was C, C#, C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Swift (in alphabetical order, not in the order of popularity).

After a gap of exactly two years, in February 2019, I wrote another article titled 'Yet Another Top Ten List of Popular Programming Languages', available at https://www.opensourceforu.com/2019/03/yet-another-top-ten-list-of-popular-programming-languages/. I used the same criteria as in 2017 to compile the Top 10 list, and the programming languages picked this time were C, C#, C++, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, PHP, Python, R, and Swift. Objective-C and R entered the Top 10 list, replacing Go and Ruby. The languages that looked especially promising in 2019 were Python and JavaScript, while Ruby and Perl showed a noticeable decline in popularity.

The article concluded with a section on new and emerging programming languages that had been first released within the previous decade (2009 or later). This list included seven languages: Swift, Go, Rust, Kotlin, Julia, TypeScript, and Dart.