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> AI assistance means that programmers can concern themselves less and less with the particulars of any language.

Sure. Until we need to. Then we face some apparently tiny concern, which is actually deeply intricated with the rest of this whole mess, and we are ready for a ride in the rabbit hole.

> most developers today don’t pay much attention to the instruction sets and other hardware idiosyncrasies of the CPUs that their code runs on, which language a program is vibe coded in ultimately becomes a minor detail.

This can be very misguided from my part but I have the feeling they are two very different cases here. Ok, not everyone is a ffmpeg level champion who will thrive in code-golfing ASM til the last drop of cycle gain.

But there are also probably reasons why third-generation programming language lasted without any other subsequent proposal completely displacing them. It’s all about a tradeoff of expressiveness and precision. What we want to keep in the focus zone, and what we want to delegate to mostly uncontrolled details.

If to go faster we need to get rid of a transparent glasses, we will need very sound and solid alternative probes to report what’s going on ahead.

Take into account that this is posted on IEEE.

In my opinion, their target audience are scientists rather than programmers, and a scientist most often think of code as a tool to express his ideas (hence, perfect AI generated code is kind of a graal). The faster he can express them, even if the code is ugly, the better. He does not care to reuse the code later most of the time.

I have the hint that scientists and not programmers are the target audience as other things may trigger only one category but not the other, for example, they consider Arduino a language, This makes totally sense for scientists, as most of the ones using Arduino dont necessarily know C++, but are proud to be able to code in Arduino.

>> most developers today don’t pay much attention to the instruction sets and other hardware idiosyncrasies of the CPUs that their code runs on, which language a program is vibe coded in ultimately becomes a minor detail.

If it was even slightly true then we wouldn’t be generating language syntax at all, we’d be generating raw machine code for the chip architectures we want to support. Or even just distributing the prompts and letting an AI VM generate the target machine code later.

That may well happen one day, but we’re not even close right now

> This can be very misguided from my part but I have the feeling they are two very different cases here

They are indeed very different. If your compiler doesn't emit the right output for your architecture, or the highly optimized library you imported breaks on your hardware, you file a bug and, depending on the third party, have help in fixing the issue. Additionally, those types of issues are rare in popular libraries and languages unless you're pushing boundaries, which likely means you are knowledgeable enough to handle those type of edge cases anyway.

If your AI gives you the wrong answer to a question, or outputs incorrect code, it's entirely on you to figure it out. You can't reach out to OpenAI or Anthropic to help you fix the issue.

The former allows you to pretty safely remain ignorant. The latter does not.

Oh dear. Using AI for something you don't understand well is surely a recipe for disaster and should not be encouraged.
All they've done is widened the plank over the abyss.
>> ...deeply intricated with... I think you invented a new phrase. And it's a good one!
It's hard to find good data sources for this, especially that StackOverflow is in decline[1].

IEEE's methodology[2] is sensible given what's possible, but the data sources are all flawed in some ways (that don't necessarily cancel each other out). The number of search results reported by Google is the most volatile indirect proxy signal. Search results include everything mentioning the query, without promising it being a fair representation of 2025. People using a language rarely refer to it literally as the "X programming language", and it's a stretch to count all publicity as a "top language" publicity.

TIOBE uses this method too, and has the audacity to display it as a popularity with two decimal places, but their historical data shows that the "popularity" of C has dropped by half over two years, and then doubled next year. Meanwhile, C didn't budge at all. This method has a +/- 50% error margin.

[1]: https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2023/12/14/language-rankings-u... [2]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-methodol...

By far the most useful and helpful is job ads: it literally defines the demand side of the programming language market.

Yes, that does not show us how much code is running out there, and some companies might have huge armies with very low churn and so the COBOL stacks in banks don’t show up, but I can’t think of a more useful and directly measurable way of understanding a languages real utility.

Plus TIOBE had Perl enter the top 10 suddenly this year but I do not see any new developers. And Ada too! Where are all those Ada programmers?
Yep. And the sources are too often self-reinforcing and self-referential.

Use the "right"/better tool from the toolbox, the tool you know best, and/or the tool that the customer wants and/or makes the most money. This might include Ada[0] or COBOL[1]. Or FORTH[2] or Lua[3]. Popularity isn't a measure of much of anything apart from SEO.

0. https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-project-summary.html

1. https://theirstack.com/en/technology/cobol

2. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/360271.360272

3. https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/relnotes/#boot-loader

I totally expected JavaScript to get the 2nd spot but looks like TypeScript pulled the votes away. I personally consider JavaScript and TypeScript to be close enough for their numbers to be added up.
Those of you surprised to see Java so prominent, where have you been all your careers? 10 people startups with nodejs backends? You must have been entirely shielded from enterprise software companies.
As a backend dev (mostly working in fintech) I feel weirdly unable to find a target language to move to.

After working with Node and Ruby for a while I really miss a static type system. - Typescript was limited by its option to allow non strictness.

Nothing catches my eye, as it’s either Java/.Net and its enterprisey companies or Go, which might not be old but feels like it is, by design. Rust sounds fun, but its usecases don’t align much with my background.

Any advice?

Well I'm happy that Haskell registers at all! At a level similar to ... LabView (oof). The article proper is rather uninteresting, I'm afraid.
I was pondering similar thoughts. Will LLM assistants ossify our current programming languages? My limited testing seems to show LLM assistants do well the more popular the language is (more data in its training), so is the hurdle for adoption of something new going to get even higher?

In an alternate universe, if LLM only had object oriented code to train on, would anyone push programming forward in other styles?

What is "Arduino" ? If it's the "Arduino" that hobbyist using to DIY device, then "Arduino" is not a language, it's C++.
I’m skeptical. There are more people writing PHP and Ruby than HTML? And HTML is a programming language? Those two very surprising results make me doubt the others.

Elixir behind OCaml? Possible, I guess, but I know of several large Elixir shops and I haven’t heard much of OCaml in a while.

I see Raku has surpassed Erlang and Clojure. https://raku.org
Python at number 1 makes me cringe... In my experience, Python is not a language that I would use for anything other than a script or some solo PoC. I would absolutely never use it on code expected to exceed 1000 lines, code that's maintained by more than one person, or code that takes more than a few seconds to run. Python has a lot of great libraries as a result of it being the language of choice to teach non software engineers at university. A lot of smart people contribute to the ecosystem, but I wish they would focus their efforts elsewhere. Preferably pick any complied, strongly typed, static language that supports multi-threading.
The methodology involves search hits, Stackoverflow, conference and journal articles.

In all of these Python is artificially over-represented. Search hits and Stackoverflow questions represent beginners who are force fed Python in university or in expensive Python consultancy sessions. Journal articles are full of "AI" topics, which use Python.

Python is not used in any application on my machine apart from OS package managers. Python is used in web back ends, but is replaced by Go. "AI" is the only real stronghold due to inertia and marketing.

Like the TIOBE index, the results of this so called survey are meaningless and of no relevance to the jobs market.

I wish Python weren't so popular. Really miss compile-time type checking.
Something feels off about these rankings, and comparing to lat year's stack overflow survey (albeit also potentially not a super accurate accounting), I'm left wondering if their sampling methods are at all accurate.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...

Even with a big uptick in Python and Java due to AI, I don't see Javascript+Typescript losing that much ground year-over-year.

huh. This seems to suggest there are more Rust jobs than Ruby. Wild considering how insanely popular Ruby was 10 years ago.
I'd like to see some clarity in these stats, it can't just be me that finds it hard to believe that there are significantly more Python jobs than Java. I wonder if job listings are saying "Python, C++" or something, so that's a point for Python, even though, the job is < 1% Python just for test rigs or something.
LLMs could also ease adoption of new languages by making hiring less of a barrier to using something more niche. It becomes easier for someone to hit the ground running and be productive even if they still need to put the time in to become an expert.

Instead I find myself more concerned with which virtual machine or compiler tool chain the language operates against. Does it need to ship with a VM or does it compile to a binary? Do I want garbage collection for this project?

Maybe in that way the decision moves up an abstaction layer the same way we largely moved away from assembly languages and caring about specific processor features.

Java still so popular after all this time. I've been re-learning java using the excellent University of Helsinki's MOOC course.

Was thinking of learning some spring boot and create a small project or two to reinforce what I've learned. However it feels like tutorials for spring boot is of so much lower quality compared to newer language/frameworks like JS/React/Python. Often times it's just a talking head over a powerpoint presentation talking for 30 minutes.

Could people recommend me a good tutorial for spring boot (or anything java that is being used in enterprises)?

Anything short of a big AI winter is not going to move Python from its top spot. As Python has become the first choice of output code for LLMs its dominance is only going to grow.
What's really interesting is the place of Elixir (below Cobol and ABAP) and more of less the same as Ada. This is very controversial when comparing it with other indexes where, for example Elixir is the most beloved programming language or the language that most people wanna use. Also compare it with the number of Elixir posts on the front page of hn.

Any idea how could it be explained?

And people try to convince me that there are Elixir jobs so its worth learning Elixir, hah
Cool but I don't know how credible this information is. From what I've read on how they got that data and came to these numbers it does not exactly inspire a high degree of confidence
Nice to see my beloved R still has some mindshare... Also Ruby.
Java at #2? Is it really still being used much for new code in this day and age? Or is its popularity mostly due to so much legacy code out there to be maintained?
English should be #1:)
I’m shocked, Java is so high up in all categories. I have never met a single Java programmer, though to be fair I started my career fairly recently.
Comparing 2024 and 2025, Ruby is growing again but still on the lower end of spectrum.

Both Java the language and JVM is great. A lot of the important work for JVM just landed. I am not even sure if there are anything that is really missing anymore. But the whole ecosystem is so vast I wonder if anyone would want to just craft out a subset of Java.

No Zig, Crystal, Odin, but Julia and Elixir is there just without numbers.

What’s going on with Swift? Seems surprisingly less popular considering it’s the official way to develop for Apple.

Is it something to do with frameworks like React?

I agree that we are only going to see solidification of languages due to tools like Claude Code. Why would I take a risk on something new if I can't use a much faster tool, it can already be such a battle getting adoption in mid/large companies. I wonder how a release like React would fare if it was released in another 5-10 years once LLMs are deeply embedded.
Shell is the most popular programming language I don't care what your list says, it has some 6-12 Billion users which is very impressive
It is an interesting study. In terms of new languages and AI, I would like to see if anyone comes up with a more AI friendly language, as opposed to human friendly. I.e. programming languages were often designed to be easier to read/write for people, but maybe it makes sense to think of languages where it would be harder for AI to make a mistake.
It’s unreasonably distracting to me that the links on this webpage repeatedly (but not always) include the preceding or following space. It looks really sloppy. How do you even to that so much on a webpage, was this typed on a WYSIWYG editor?
Boy those Erlang people are sure loud, I was expecting it in top 15.
Is PHP including wordpress and the other ones like drupal (not sure anyone uses that garbage anymore)? If yes, then should not PHP and Python also be included as C projects?
Kinda surprising that I see nothing from Zig on all these lists.
I'm just happy that both VHDL and ADA are in the list.
I enjoy seeing FORTRAN and COBOL ranking above Clojure.
If there is HTML in the list then why not JSON?
PHP just seems to drop lower each year. Looks like there is little to gain from using PHP in 2025