Programming Language Statistics (2026)

Programming language “popularity” depends on what you measure (developer surveys, open-source activity, or long-term industry signals).

Below are fresh, data-backed snapshots from three widely cited benchmarks: the TIOBE Index, the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, and GitHub’s Octoverse.

Key programming language statistics

• TIOBE (Feb 2026): Python ranks #1 with a 21.81% rating, followed by C (11.05%), C++ (8.55%), Java (8.12%), and C# (6.83%).
• TIOBE trend: Python peaked at 26.98% (July 2025) and stands at 21.81% in Feb 2026.
• Stack Overflow (2025, all respondents): 66% used JavaScript in the past year; HTML/CSS (61.9%), SQL (58.6%), and Python (57.9%) follow closely.
• Stack Overflow (2025): Python adoption increased by 7 percentage points from 2024 to 2025.
• Stack Overflow (2025 “admired”): Rust leads admired languages at 72% (developers who used it and want to keep using it).
• GitHub Octoverse (2025): TypeScript became GitHub’s most used language (ranked by monthly contributors) in August 2025.
• GitHub Octoverse (Aug 2025): TypeScript reached 2,636,006 monthly contributors and led new repositories.
• GitHub Octoverse (YoY growth, Aug 2024→Aug 2025): TypeScript +66.63% (~1,054,015 contributor gain), Python +48.78% (~850,579), JavaScript +24.79% (~427,148).
• GitHub Octoverse (activity): Developers merged a record 518.7M pull requests (+29% YoY).
• GitHub scale: 180M+ developers build on GitHub, with 36M+ new developers in the past year.
• GitHub new repos (Sep 2024–Aug 2025): JavaScript (9,345,046) and Python (9,261,587) are nearly tied, with TypeScript at 5,394,256.
• GitHub concentration: Nearly 80% of new repositories used six languages: Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C++, and C#.

Chart 1: Top languages in the TIOBE Index (Feb 2026)

These ratings are a long-running industry signal based on things like courses, vendors, and search activity across many sites (not the same as “most code written”).

Language	Bar	Rating
Python		21.81%
C		11.05%
C++		8.55%
Java		8.12%
C#		6.83%
JavaScript		2.92%
Visual Basic		2.85%
R		2.19%

Max = 21.81%. Widths: Python 100.00%, C 50.66%, C++ 39.20%, Java 37.23%, C# 31.32%, JavaScript 13.39%, Visual Basic 13.07%, R 10.04%.

Chart 2: Most-used languages (Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025)

This view reflects what respondents reported using in the past year (not an index score). Web and data-adjacent languages dominate the top slots.

Language	Bar	Used (past year)
JavaScript		66%
HTML/CSS		61.9%
SQL		58.6%
Python		57.9%
Bash/Shell		48.7%
TypeScript		43.6%
Java		29.4%
C#		27.8%

Max = 66%. Widths: JavaScript 100.00%, HTML/CSS 93.79%, SQL 88.79%, Python 87.73%, Bash/Shell 73.79%, TypeScript 66.06%, Java 44.55%, C# 42.12%.

Chart 3: Languages in new GitHub repositories (Sep 2024–Aug 2025)

This view shows which languages appeared most often in repositories created over the last 12 months in GitHub’s Octoverse dataset (a measure of new project creation volume).

Language	Bar	Repositories
JavaScript		9,345,046
Python		9,261,587
TypeScript		5,394,256
Java		3,520,215
C++		1,701,552
C#		1,478,463

Max = 9,345,046 repositories. Widths: JavaScript 100.00%, Python 99.11%, TypeScript 57.72%, Java 37.67%, C++ 18.21%, C# 15.82%.

Sources

• TIOBE Index (February 2026)
• Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025 (Most popular technologies; Technology section)
• GitHub Octoverse 2025 (Octoverse report article on language usage and new repositories)