The July 2020 edition of the TIOBE Index reveals an interesting climb in the popularity of programming language R.
R is a statistical language which notably crashed out of the top 20 in TIOBE’s Index for the first time in three years in May.
“A possible reason for this is that statistical programming is finding its way from university to industry nowadays, and Python is more accepted by the industry,” TIOBE mulled in May.
R has made a remarkable recovery to take 8th place in the rankings, just behind JavaScript and Visual Basic.
“Universities and research institutes embrace Python and R for their statistical analyses,” says Paul Jansen, CEO of Tiobe Software. “Lots of statistics and data mining need to be done to find a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus. As a consequence, statistical programming languages that are easy to learn and use, gain popularity now.”
R didn’t make GitHub’s top languages since 2014. GitHub’s list is led by JavaScript, and followed by Python, Java, PHP, C#, C++, TypeScript, Shell, C and Ruby.
C has extended its lead as the most popular language in TIOBE’s rankings, with a 2.24% increase. The general-purpose, procedural language stole the pole position from Java back in May.
Prior to May, Java enjoyed around five years of leadership over C.
The rest of TIOBE’s rankings for July have little notable changes, with most in the top 10 retaining their popularity. You can view the current rankings here.
(Photo by Stephan Henning on Unsplash)
