The language of Kotlin, known for being a strong adversary to Java and advocated by Google for Android mobile app development, has been steadily climbing the ranks in Tiobe's index for language popularity. In November 2023, Kotlin successfully made it to the 15th position, showing promising progress.
Kotlin first broke into the top 20 of the Tiobe Index in September, earning a rating of .9%. Fast forward a couple of months and Kotlin’s rating has seen a sizeable jump to 1.15% this November. The previous month witnessed Kotlin securing the 18th place.
Several factors contribute to Kotlin’s upward trajectory in the language ranking. Tiobe, a company known for providing software quality services, mentions Kotlin's compatibility with Java and its commendable accommodation for Android among the significant reasons for its accelerated rise. According to Paul Jansen, Tiobe CEO, Kotlin also aligns well with the ongoing trend towards expressive programming languages. These languages come with a robust type system and are designed to dodge null pointer exceptions, which are common pain points in the coding world.
With these attributes to its name, Jansen believes in Kotlin’s potential to break into the top 10. He voiced his expectations, saying, 'With all signs pointing to growth, there's little doubt that Kotlin can reach a top 10 position.' However, he also added an intriguing conjecture about whether Kotlin can ever rise to the top four positions. Only time will tell if Kotlin can reach such heights.
The Tiobe Index derives its ranking based on an equation that measures the number of skilled developers, courses, and third-party vendors globally for each language. It analyzes data from multiple search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
In stark contrast, Kotlin did not fare as well in the competing Pypl Popularity of Programming languages index in the same month. Pypl's ranking methodology centers around the frequency of language tutorial searches on Google. According to this system, Kotlin secured the 13th spot with a share of 1.76%, showing a slight dip from last year's popularity.
The continued rise of Kotlin signals an exciting shift in the programming world. And with technology platforms like AppMaster.io providing no-code solutions that generate real backend, web, and mobile applications, developers will continue to seek languages like Kotlin that offer strong capabilities with user-friendly syntax. Tradable enough for continued positive disruption within the technology sector.
