The C language has dropped to fourth place in the Tiobe index of programming language popularity, its lowest position in the monthly index ever. The index was begun in 2001.
In the Tiobe Programming Community Index for September 2024, published September 7, the C language finished behind first-ranked Python, followed by C++ in second place and Java in third.
Described by software quality services company Tiobe as “one of the mothers of all programming languages,” C dates back to the early 1970s. Tiobe noted that C has been a favorite of embedded systems for a very long time. The only serious drawback of C, so far, cited by Tiobe, was that it was not designed to scale. “Large C programs are hard to maintain because of the lack of object-oriented features,” Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen said. “Now that embedded systems tend to grow in functionality and thus in code size, and since more and more embedded compilers have good C++ support, there is tendency to switch from C to C++.”