Programming Language Statistics 2026: Popularity, Salary, and Growth Data

Every year, dozens of articles rank programming languages. Most of them just copy-paste TIOBE numbers without understanding what they actually measure. Or they cite a single survey and pretend it's the full picture.

This page is different. I pulled data from every major source that tracks programming language usage, popularity, developer satisfaction, salary outcomes, and growth trends. TIOBE measures search engine interest. GitHub Octoverse measures actual code contributed. Stack Overflow measures what developers say they use. RedMonk combines GitHub and Stack Overflow data. SlashData directly surveys developer communities.

Each of these tells a different story. Together, they paint the complete picture. Every stat has a named source and a year. Let's get into the numbers.

The TIOBE Index: February 2026 Rankings

The TIOBE Programming Community Index measures programming language popularity based on search engine results for queries like "<language> programming" across Google, Bing, Wikipedia, Amazon, and other major sites. It's not a measure of quality or lines of code written. It's a measure of how much attention each language gets.

The headline: Python dominates with 21.81%, more than 10 percentage points ahead of its nearest competitor. But the more interesting story is that Python is declining from its July 2025 peak of 26.98%. TIOBE attributes this to specialized languages like R and Perl gaining ground at Python's expense in their respective niches.

C# was named TIOBE's Language of the Year for 2025, earning the biggest year-over-year rating increase of any language. That's significant. C#'s growth is driven by Unity game development, .NET ecosystem maturity, and strong enterprise adoption. It's one of the quieter success stories in programming today.

One thing that catches most people off guard: JavaScript ranks only 6th on TIOBE with 2.92%. That seems absurdly low for the language that powers every website. The explanation is methodology. TIOBE measures search queries about languages, and JavaScript developers rarely search for "JavaScript programming" because the language is so ubiquitous. It's embedded in frameworks, tutorials, and web development content without being explicitly named. The TIOBE ranking for JavaScript is misleading as a popularity measure. Other sources tell a very different story.

Also notable: TypeScript ranks 32nd on TIOBE at 0.47%. That's borderline absurd considering it's the #1 language on GitHub. TIOBE simply doesn't capture how TypeScript is actually used. Developers search for "React" or "Node.js," not "TypeScript programming." If you're making career decisions, don't use TIOBE rankings alone.

GitHub Octoverse 2025: What Developers Actually Write

While TIOBE measures what people search for, GitHub Octoverse measures what developers actually commit to repositories. GitHub has over 180 million developers and 630 million total repositories. Their data reflects real coding activity, not search interest.

The headline from Octoverse 2025: TypeScript overtook both Python and JavaScript in August 2025 to become the most-used language on GitHub by monthly contributors. GitHub called this "the most significant language shift in more than a decade."

Why TypeScript? According to GitHub, it's about typed languages making agent-assisted coding more reliable. When AI writes code (via Copilot or other tools), type systems catch errors that would slip through in vanilla JavaScript. Nearly every major frontend framework now scaffolds with TypeScript by default: Next.js, SvelteKit, Nuxt, Angular, all of them.

Other key findings from Octoverse 2025:

Developers created more than 230 new repositories every minute on GitHub in 2025. They merged 43.2 million pull requests per month on average, up 23% year over year. Total commits reached nearly 1 billion in 2025, up 25.1% from the prior year, including a record 100 million commits in August alone.

Jupyter Notebook usage nearly doubled, with 2.4 million repositories using them (up 75% YoY). Dockerfile adoption exploded, with 1.9 million repositories using them (up 120% YoY). The AI infrastructure buildout is happening in real time, and these two technologies sit at the center of prototyping (notebooks) and deploying (containers) AI workloads.

LLM SDK adoption grew 178% year over year: over 1.1 million public repositories now use large language model SDKs, with 693,867 new projects created in the past 12 months alone. Monthly contributors to generative AI projects tripled from 68,000 in January 2024 to 200,000 by August 2025. The AI wave is not theoretical. It's in the code.

Stack Overflow 2025: What Developers Say They Use

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey is the largest annual survey of developers, collecting responses from tens of thousands of professionals. Unlike TIOBE (search interest) or GitHub (code activity), Stack Overflow captures self-reported language usage across all development contexts, including private codebases.

Notice the contrast with TIOBE: JavaScript ranks #1 on Stack Overflow at 66% usage, but only #6 on TIOBE. Python ranks #4 on Stack Overflow but #1 on TIOBE. Different methodologies, dramatically different results. This is why you need multiple data sources.

Python's +7 percentage point jump in a single year is the biggest mover in the 2025 survey. Stack Overflow attributes this to AI, data science, and back-end development. The AI gold rush is pulling developers into the Python ecosystem at a rate we haven't seen for any language in years.

RedMonk Rankings: GitHub + Stack Overflow Combined

RedMonk takes a unique approach: they combine GitHub code activity with Stack Overflow discussion activity to produce bi-annual rankings. Their January 2025 rankings:

RedMonk's top 3 has been stable for years: JavaScript, Python, Java. RedMonk noted the top 10 was "not entirely devoid of movement, but nearly so." The stability at the top reflects an entrenched ecosystem. Languages that power the web (JavaScript), data science (Python), and enterprise backends (Java) aren't going anywhere.

Rust at #19 on RedMonk is interesting. It's the most admired language on Stack Overflow but still hasn't cracked RedMonk's top 15. That gap between love and actual usage tells you something: developers want to use Rust, but most real-world projects still run on JavaScript, Python, and Java.

Developer Satisfaction: Most Admired and Most Desired

The Stack Overflow 2025 survey asks developers which languages they admire (love using) and which they desire (want to start using). These metrics predict future adoption better than current usage stats.

Rust's 9th consecutive year as the most admired language is remarkable. No other language has held this title for more than a few years. Developers who use Rust overwhelmingly want to keep using it. The borrow checker frustrates newcomers, but those who push through become evangelists.

Gleam is a newcomer to the list, a type-safe language for the Erlang virtual machine. Its 70% admiration rate out of the gate signals that developers are hungry for languages that combine functional programming with practical tooling. Zig, another rising star, appeals to systems programmers looking for a C replacement that's simpler than Rust.

Go (Golang) has a different distinction: it was the language developers most aspire to work with in the 2025 survey. More developers want to learn Go than any other language. Its simplicity, excellent concurrency model, and cloud-native pedigree make it the language developers know they should learn next.

Global Developer Population: 47.2 Million and Counting

SlashData, a market research firm that directly surveys developer communities, estimates the global developer population at 47.2 million as of early 2025. That's up 50% from 31 million in Q1 2022.

But the growth rate is slowing. Between 2022 and 2023: +15%. Between 2023 and 2024: +21% (fueled by post-pandemic investment). Between 2024 and 2025: +10%. SlashData suggests this slowdown may mark the beginning of a plateau.

The composition is shifting in an important way. Professional developers grew 70% from 21.8 million to 36.5 million over three years. Amateur developers actually declined by over 1 million in the last year. The developer population is getting older and more professional. Developers aged 18-24 dropped from 33% to 23% of the population in just three years. The 35-44 age group grew from 22% to 26%.

Geographically, Western Europe and North America each have roughly 9.5 million developers. South Asia nearly doubled from 4 million to 7.5 million, driven by India. Greater China nearly tripled from 2.4 million to 5.8 million. South America doubled from 1.7 million to 3.4 million.

GitHub's own numbers are even bigger: over 180 million developer accounts, with 36 million new accounts in 2025. The discrepancy is because GitHub counts all accounts (including inactive ones), while SlashData estimates active developers. India alone added 5.2 million GitHub accounts in 2025, making it the single largest source of new developers.

Salary by Programming Language

Your language choice directly impacts your paycheck. Multiple salary surveys give us a clear picture of which languages pay the most in 2025:

Solidity at $167K shouldn't surprise anyone. Blockchain development requires specialized knowledge, the developer pool is tiny, and the projects are high-stakes. Erlang at $152K is the same story: niche expertise, massive telecom infrastructure, limited supply.

The more actionable insight: Go at $146,879 average salary, combined with being the most desired language on Stack Overflow, makes it the single best language to learn if you want to maximize career ROI right now. High pay, growing demand, and a supply shortage. That's the trifecta.

Python at $125,740 seems low for the world's most popular language. Again, it's the supply problem. With 57.9% of all developers using Python, the market is flooded. The Python developers earning top dollar are the ones combining it with ML/AI specialization, not the ones building web apps. For deeper salary analysis, see our complete software developer salary statistics page.

AI's Impact on Programming Languages

AI is now baked into the programming language story. Here's how the data shows AI reshaping language choices:

85% of developers regularly use AI tools for coding according to JetBrains' 2025 Developer Ecosystem Survey (24,534 responses from 194 countries). That's not early adopters. That's mainstream. 62% of developers use at least one AI coding assistant, agent, or code editor daily.

GitHub Copilot hit 20 million users in 2025, adding 5 million in just three months (TechCrunch, 2025). It's used by 90% of Fortune 100 companies. Among new GitHub users, 80% adopt Copilot within their first week. AI-assisted coding isn't the future. It's the present.

ChatGPT leads AI coding tool adoption at 64% of professional developers, followed by GitHub Copilot at 49% (SlashData via PRNewswire, Q3 2025).

The AI effect on language choice is real. GitHub's Octoverse report explicitly links TypeScript's rise to #1 with AI-assisted coding: "TypeScript's rise illustrates how developers are shifting toward typed languages that make agent-assisted coding more reliable in production." When AI writes your code, type safety becomes a productivity multiplier because the compiler catches the mistakes the AI makes.

Python's AI-driven surge (+7pp on Stack Overflow) reflects its role as the language of AI development itself. Every major ML framework (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Hugging Face) runs on Python. The LLM SDK explosion on GitHub (1.1 million+ repos, +178% YoY) is overwhelmingly Python-based.

Job Market Demand by Language

Popularity and job demand aren't the same thing. Here's what the U.S. job market looks like by language:

Python leads with 64,000+ open positions in the U.S. as of 2025, far ahead of Java (43,000+) and JavaScript (30,000+), according to GKDrift's analysis. Rust job postings grew 35% year over year in 2025 (IT Support Group). Go demand grew +41%, making it one of the fastest-growing languages by hiring demand.

The demand-to-supply ratio matters more than raw job counts. Rust and Go have fewer total postings than Python, but they also have far fewer available developers. If you know Go, you're competing against 16.4% of the developer population. If you know Python, you're competing against 57.9%. The math favors the specialized languages.

The Rankings Compared: Where Every Source Disagrees

Here's the synthesis that no other article provides. Every major ranking source tells a different story because they measure different things:

The biggest disagreement: TypeScript is #1 on GitHub but #32 on TIOBE. That's not a small gap. It shows how different measurement approaches produce wildly different conclusions. If you only looked at TIOBE, you'd think TypeScript barely matters. If you only looked at GitHub, you'd think it's the dominant language.

The truth: TypeScript is the most actively contributed-to language on the world's largest code platform. But developers don't search for "TypeScript programming" because it's embedded in the JavaScript ecosystem. Both things are true simultaneously.

Data Sources and Methodology

Every statistic on this page comes from a named, verifiable source. Here's the complete list:

TIOBE Index (February 2026) measures programming language popularity based on search engine query volume across Google, Bing, Wikipedia, Amazon, and 20+ other sites. Updated monthly. It's a measure of search interest, not usage.

GitHub Octoverse 2025 measures actual coding activity across GitHub's 180 million+ developers and 630 million repositories. Based on commits, pull requests, and contributor activity. Reflects real code written.

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025 collects self-reported data from 31,771+ developers on language usage and over 49,000 on broader topics. The largest developer survey in existence.

RedMonk Programming Language Rankings (January 2025) combine GitHub code activity with Stack Overflow discussion activity. Published bi-annually.

SlashData estimates global developer populations through their semi-annual Global Developer Survey. Their 2025 report covers 47.2 million developers.

Additional sources: JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Survey 2025 (24,534 respondents), VentureBeat (2025 language salary data), GKDrift (2025 job market data), Second Talent (2025 usage statistics compilation), TechCrunch (GitHub Copilot data), Forbes (Octoverse analysis), IT Support Group (Rust job growth data), InfoWorld (TIOBE commentary), Daily.dev (language trends), and Phaedra Solutions / DevJobsScanner (salary ranges).