Will AI Mean Bring an End to Top Programming Language Rankings?
Published on September 28, 2025 at 11:56PM
IEEE Spectrum ranks the popularity of programming languages — but is there a problem? Programmers "are turning away from many of these public expressions of interest. Rather than page through a book or search a website like Stack Exchange for answers to their questions, they'll chat with an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT in a private conversation." And with an AI assistant like Cursor helping to write code, the need to pose questions in the first place is significantly decreased. For example, across the total set of languages evaluated in the Top Programming Languages, the number of questions we saw posted per week on Stack Exchange in 2025 was just 22% of what it was in 2024... However, an even more fundamental problem is looming in the wings... In the same way 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... [T]he popularity of different computer languages could become as obscure a topic as the relative popularity of railway track gauges... But if an AI is soothing our irritations with today's languages, will any new ones ever reach the kind of critical mass needed to make an impact? Will the popularity of today's languages remain frozen in time? That's ultimately the larger question. "how much abstraction and anti-foot-shooting structure will a sufficiently-advanced coding AI really need...?" [C]ould we get our AIs to go straight from prompt to an intermediate language that could be fed into the interpreter or compiler of our choice? Do we need high-level languages at all in that future? True, this would turn programs into inscrutable black boxes, but they could still be divided into modular testable units for sanity and quality checks. And instead of trying to read or maintain source code, programmers would just tweak their prompts and generate software afresh. What's the role of the programmer in a future without source code? Architecture design and algorithm selection would remain vital skills... How should a piece of software be interfaced with a larger system? How should new hardware be exploited? In this scenario, computer science degrees, with their emphasis on fundamentals over the details of programming languages, rise in value over coding boot camps. Will there be a Top Programming Language in 2026? Right now, programming is going through the biggest transformation since compilers broke onto the scene in the early 1950s. Even if the predictions that much of AI is a bubble about to burst come true, the thing about tech bubbles is that there's always some residual technology that survives. It's likely that using LLMs to write and assist with code is something that's going to stick. So we're going to be spending the next 12 months figuring out what popularity means in this new age, and what metrics might be useful to measure. Having said that, IEEE Spectrum still ranks programming language popularity three ways — based on use among working programmers, demand from employers, and "trending" in the zeitgeist — using seven different metrics. Their results? Among programmers, "we see that once again Python has the top spot, with the biggest change in the top five being JavaScript's drop from third place last year to sixth place this year. As JavaScript is often used to create web pages, and vibe coding is often used to create websites, this drop in the apparent popularity may be due to the effects of AI... In the 'Jobs' ranking, which looks exclusively at what skills employers are looking for, we see that Python has also taken 1st place, up from second place last year, though SQL expertise remains an incredibly valuable skill to have on your resume."
Published on September 28, 2025 at 11:56PM
IEEE Spectrum ranks the popularity of programming languages — but is there a problem? Programmers "are turning away from many of these public expressions of interest. Rather than page through a book or search a website like Stack Exchange for answers to their questions, they'll chat with an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT in a private conversation." And with an AI assistant like Cursor helping to write code, the need to pose questions in the first place is significantly decreased. For example, across the total set of languages evaluated in the Top Programming Languages, the number of questions we saw posted per week on Stack Exchange in 2025 was just 22% of what it was in 2024... However, an even more fundamental problem is looming in the wings... In the same way 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... [T]he popularity of different computer languages could become as obscure a topic as the relative popularity of railway track gauges... But if an AI is soothing our irritations with today's languages, will any new ones ever reach the kind of critical mass needed to make an impact? Will the popularity of today's languages remain frozen in time? That's ultimately the larger question. "how much abstraction and anti-foot-shooting structure will a sufficiently-advanced coding AI really need...?" [C]ould we get our AIs to go straight from prompt to an intermediate language that could be fed into the interpreter or compiler of our choice? Do we need high-level languages at all in that future? True, this would turn programs into inscrutable black boxes, but they could still be divided into modular testable units for sanity and quality checks. And instead of trying to read or maintain source code, programmers would just tweak their prompts and generate software afresh. What's the role of the programmer in a future without source code? Architecture design and algorithm selection would remain vital skills... How should a piece of software be interfaced with a larger system? How should new hardware be exploited? In this scenario, computer science degrees, with their emphasis on fundamentals over the details of programming languages, rise in value over coding boot camps. Will there be a Top Programming Language in 2026? Right now, programming is going through the biggest transformation since compilers broke onto the scene in the early 1950s. Even if the predictions that much of AI is a bubble about to burst come true, the thing about tech bubbles is that there's always some residual technology that survives. It's likely that using LLMs to write and assist with code is something that's going to stick. So we're going to be spending the next 12 months figuring out what popularity means in this new age, and what metrics might be useful to measure. Having said that, IEEE Spectrum still ranks programming language popularity three ways — based on use among working programmers, demand from employers, and "trending" in the zeitgeist — using seven different metrics. Their results? Among programmers, "we see that once again Python has the top spot, with the biggest change in the top five being JavaScript's drop from third place last year to sixth place this year. As JavaScript is often used to create web pages, and vibe coding is often used to create websites, this drop in the apparent popularity may be due to the effects of AI... In the 'Jobs' ranking, which looks exclusively at what skills employers are looking for, we see that Python has also taken 1st place, up from second place last year, though SQL expertise remains an incredibly valuable skill to have on your resume."
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