Recently, Tiobe released the November 2020 programming language rankings. The ranking shows that Python surpassed Java for the first time and became the second most popular programming language.
In the nearly 20-year history of the Tiobe Index, C and Java have always firmly occupied the top two positions. Now, Java has “fallen from the altar” and has been overtaken by Python, ranking third.
Specifically, Python saw a 2.27% increase compared to the same period last year, while Java saw a 4.47% decline during the same period.
In RedMonk’s July programming language rankings, Python also took away Java’s second place.
At the end of October, developer report data released by SlashData showed that Python had 9 million users worldwide, ranking second. Slashdata compared the data to 2017 and found that the number of developers using Python increased by 2.2 million in the previous year alone, driven by the wave of data science and machine learning.
According to the latest popularity rankings of IEEE Spectrum in the United States, Python has gradually become a top programming language.
There is no doubt that Python is becoming more and more popular in the fields of machine learning and data science under the wave of artificial intelligence. Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen said that the popularity of Python as a programming language has increased significantly recently. The main reason is that for non-scientific programmers, it has a low learning threshold and is easy to get started, rather than just being a language for advanced programmers.
“I believe that the popularity of Python is related to widespread demand,” Jansen wrote. “In the past, most programming activities were performed by software engineers. However, programming skills are now needed everywhere, and there is a shortage of excellent software developers. So we should have simple things that can be handled by non-software engineers, and Python fits the bill perfectly.”
Paul Jansen also mentioned one thing: some time ago, his car had a flat tire on the road, so he called the highway patrol hoping to get a solution. During the chat with the staff, the repairman talked very enthusiastically about his hobby-programming in Python.
“From that moment on, I knew Python was going to become ubiquitous,” he said.
In the article “Python Eats the World”, Nick Heath wrote: Now, people’s enthusiasm for Python has far exceeded the original developer circle. Some predict that as Python’s user base grows rapidly, it will soon become the most popular programming language in the world. Millions of people use Python every day, and the user base has grown exponentially with almost no signs of decline.
Whether they are professional or amateur developers, they are using Python to solve tasks large and small, especially web developers, data scientists, and system administrators. The first batch of black hole images that appeared this year were spliced using Python.
Python plays a key role in some world-famous organizations. For example, Netflix uses Python to provide streaming video to more than 100 million households around the world, Instagram uses Python to realize image sharing, and NASA uses Python to explore space.
Reprinted in Toutiao-InfoQ