Revisiting Popular Programming Languages: The 2026 Edition
OpenSource For U, Thursday, April 16th, 2026
As always, this ranking of the Top 10 popular open source programming languages is based on four other rankings. A new entrant this year is Rust.
Over the past decade, I have contributed three articles to Open Source For You (OSFY) focusing on the ranking of popular programming languages. The first article on this subject, titled '10 Most Popular Programming Languages', was published in 2017.
It is a difficult as well as controversial task to rank programming languages for popularity or usefulness. So, rather than depending on a single ranking, I considered the four most popular rankings of programming languages: the RedMonk programming language ranking, the PYPL (PopularitY of Programming Language Index) ranking, the IEEE Spectrum ranking of programming languages, and the TIOBE index.
My top 10 list of programming languages that year was C, C#, C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Swift (in alphabetical order, not in the order of popularity).