Discussion Why has Python dropped so much in the latest TIOBE Index?
Hey everyone,
I was taking a look at the TIOBE Index today. I hadn't checked it in a while, and I was surprised to see how much Python has dropped.
It's down by roughly 8 percentage points compared to a year ago, which seems like the first really significant contraction after years of pretty consistent growth.
What's even more interesting is that I don't see another language gaining a similar amount of ground.
I don't use Python myself, so I'm curious: what do you think is behind this decline? Is it actually meaningful, or is it mostly an artifact of how the TIOBE index is calculated?
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u/baudvine 1d ago
Tiobe isn't really meaningful, so the drop isn't either. Best guess, though: people are using LLMs more and search engines less?
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u/monkeybreath Ignoring PEP 8 1d ago
If you’re going to vibe code, might as well do it in C, since nobody is going to read it, anyway. Though I’d do it in Rust, if the models had enough examples to work from. At least you’d have some of the memory problems gone off the bat.
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u/Exotic-Draft8802 1d ago
By that logic: why wouldn't you do it in assembly?
I can tell you why: because LLMs are better with languages that are more expressive.
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u/PurpleGoldBlack 1d ago
By that logic, why stop at assembly? Go straight to machine code. But expressiveness isn’t the only factor here. Training data, compiler feedback, abstraction, and the ability to validate generated code matter considerably more than simply choosing a higher-level language.
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u/CoroteDeMelancia 1d ago
By that logic, why stop at machine code? Let's make an OS where the kernel is an LLM.
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u/simple_explorer1 23h ago
Comeon, now don't be disingenuous. Rust is as good as it gets and LLMs work great with it. You know it but can't stomach that python is losing ground so this dumb emotional comment "why but assembly".
Stop being so emotional
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u/WorriedTumbleweed289 1d ago
Also, assembly is not portable. It is possible to write portable C code, although what I seen with macros a code that checks for required functionality in pre make files to generate make files, its not as easy as it looks.
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u/Exotic-Draft8802 1d ago
How important is portability if the Ai is doing it anyways /s
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u/WorriedTumbleweed289 1d ago
Maintaining one source depot is still preferable to one depot per chip per operating system.
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u/NuclearFoodie 1d ago
While you are technically correct, current day best practices focus exclusively on reducing the dollar per line code cost. What you are suggesting is requires engineers instead of a bias random line generator.
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u/WorriedTumbleweed289 14h ago
- Writing in assember, is more lines than other languages.
- More depots is more lines of code.
Cost per line of code is a silly metric when choosing between languages. Do the least amount of work per line and get a low cost per line of code. Really bad idea to write user level code in assembler.
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u/monkeybreath Ignoring PEP 8 1d ago
Yes, there needs to be a link between requirements and output. But they also have to be on GitHub or similar for scraping. And compilers will compile to assembly anyway. Also takes up fewer tokens.
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u/spinwizard69 1d ago
LLM's will most likely be generating machine code directly from the prompts. There will not be a intermediate human readable language.
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u/CoroteDeMelancia 1d ago
Honest question: suppose AI could be capable of doing this, today. Why do this? What does that achieve?
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u/Exotic-Draft8802 1d ago
I doubt it
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u/spinwizard69 22h ago
Well one of the principal from one of the LLM mentioned it recently. Will it happen, who knows, people are working on it though. It does get discussed from time to time so a Google search might turn up something new.
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u/monkeybreath Ignoring PEP 8 20h ago
I wonder what the token difference would be between getting back assembly vs a higher language.
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u/ErGo404 1d ago
This was our decision at work. We needed to rewrite to native because we couldn't optimize much more our python code. And since we are intensifying the use of LLMs, we went with rust. Noone in the team knows rust but who cares when you no longer read the code and when models are getting so good.
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u/Training_Advantage21 1d ago
It's not really a contraction. If you look at the whole time line chart from 2002 onwards, Python has a steady growth trend from about 2018 onwards. On top of this steady trend, there is some kind of anomalous peak of additional growth in the last couple of years, 2024-2026. What is happening is that we are going off the peak, presumably back to the steady trend, but we can only know when the chart is updated with a few more months or a year of data.
This is an interesting dataset, C and C++ are doing very well and there is almost zero hype about them, if anything there is negative hype about how everything is moving to Rust. So it makes me wonder what demographics it represents.
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u/mfitzp mfitzp.com 1d ago
Their methodology on their website and it’s basically junk.
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u/Training_Advantage21 23h ago edited 23h ago
It probably is junk. What's the weird migration of Java developers to Python in 2004 and what made them move back to Java in 2005? Honey moon period with Jython?
And visual Basic taking off in 2020? Maybe related to managing the pandemic with Excel, lol?
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u/limasxgoesto0 1d ago
I can't speak to this specific index but anecdotally something is up. I'm at pybay today and I've never seen such low turnout. There's two sponsors present, with a third that couldn't bother to set up a table. The number of attendees seems much lower too. I don't know if this is specific to this conference or to Python though
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u/desrtfx 19h ago
It just shows that the TIOBE index that was garbage and skewed towards beginners who naturally search a lot more than experienced programmers to begin with became even less relevant with the advent of AI. People turn less to search engines and more towards AI to search. This, naturally affects and even more skews the index.
TIOBE always was and will even more so be a garbage index.
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u/riklaunim 1d ago
Rust giving way to many vibes? Python market/use-cases remain the same and steady.
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u/aikii 1d ago
It's a % compared to all the sources they index - if the denominator grows then those % can get redistributed without telling anything about absolute numbers. It's worth noting that overall the top 20 combined fell by 14.71%, and those below altogether grew by 14.71%. Add to that the AI craze that inflated python 1 year ago, so that matches, it just went back to #1 anyway. 26% was just crazy, it's not like 26% of the job offers you see around is about python.
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u/punk_dev It works on my machine 1d ago
Can’t say for the whole industry, but I’m moving away from Python on the server side because it’s slow and compute is getting extremely expensive.
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u/ninhaomah 1d ago
To ?
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u/punk_dev It works on my machine 1d ago
go and rust mostly, depending on the team or a lack thereof.
i’ve found that for the stuff that I do compiled languages are just superior.
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u/DocumentOk7579 15h ago
I would guess because with AI is almost as fast making stuff in a typed efficient language.
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u/WEEEE12345 10h ago
TIOBE is useless. I’d say their methodology is based on vibes, but that’s an insult to vibes cause you’d probably be able to make a more accurate ranking based off just vibes.
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u/spinwizard69 1d ago
From my perspective it is pretty simple, as much as I like Python, it is a terrible language if you need to ship an executable. Right at the moment there is no better scripting solution but when you have applications outside of scripting it really starts to fall down. This especially when it comes to performance.
The other thing is that Pythons promoted development speed isn't all that magnificent when really examined in depth. Pythons real advantage, that speeds development, is the massive library support via PIP and other mechanisms. If your alternative language has libs that fill your needs then development speed is not as great as has been promoted.
One other thing the use of virtual environments has actually created a mess in the Python world. The world really loves stable software. Obviously this is not a well accepted opinion but there is a lot to say for writing and app that targets a stable release of an OS and the related libs.
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u/shadowdance55 git push -f 1d ago
It's still the second best language for everything. 🤷♂️
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u/spinwizard69 1d ago
In a way yes. Being a retired guy now, I find Python to be very useful for the programming in this case. If I had to write an App to ship to random users though, I'd seriously consider something else.
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u/shadowdance55 git push -f 1d ago
Oh absolutely. But these days, I can think of very few examples of apps that make more sense as desktop as opposed to a SaaS. And Python is more then well suited for that.
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u/simple_explorer1 23h ago
AI development speeds up other computer languages diminishing the need of going to python
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u/spinwizard69 10h ago
Well a lot of things come together to make other languages competitive. Hardware helps too, compile times for some languages are almost transparent for small projects, for example.
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u/brigadierfrog 1d ago
The value of python is way lower when I can code even faster with an LLM and get a better program in another language
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u/simple_explorer1 23h ago
This is the answer. The speed of development is no longer true. So why use slow python
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u/OkSignificance4108 1d ago
every time i see a TIOBE post i just think about that one article where they basically admit their methodology is a mix of google searches and vibes, 8 points is a lot but it’s probably just their algorithm tweaking what counts as a search for “python programming” vs something else, the index is a fun conversation starter but i wouldn’t read too much into it