C# Challenges Java in Programming Language Popularity

"The gap between C# and Java never has been so small," according to October's update for TIOBE's "Programming Community Index". "Currently, the difference is only 1.2%, and if the trends remain this way, C# will surpass Java in about 2 month's time."Java shows the largest decline of -3.92% and C# the largest gain of +3.29% of all programming languages (annually). The two languages have always been used in similar domains and thus have been competitors for more than 2 decades now. Java's decline in popularity is mainly caused by Oracle's decision to introduce a paid license model after Java 8. Microsoft took the opposite approach with C#. In the past, C# could only be used as part of commercial tool Visual Studio. Nowadays, C# is free and open source and it's embraced by many developers. There are also other reasons for Java's decline. First of all, the Java language definition has not changed much the past few years and Kotlin, its fully compatible direct competitor, is easier to use and free of charge. "Java remains a critical language in enterprise computing," argues InfoWorld, "with Java 21 just released last month and Java 22 due next March. And free open source binaries of Java still are available via OpenJDK." InfoWorld also notes TIOBE's ranking is different than other indexes. TIOBE's top 10:Python (14.82%)C (12.08%)C++ (10.67%)Java (8.92%)C# (7.71%)JavaScript (2.91%)Visual Basic (2.13%)PHP (1.9%)SQL (1.78%)Assembly (1.64%)And here's the Pypl Popularity of Programming Language (based on searches for language tutorials on Google):Python, with a 28.05% shareJava (15.88%)JavaScript (9.27%)C# (6.79%)C/C++ (6.59%)PHP (4.86%)R (4.45%)TypeScript (2.93%)Swift (2.69%)Objective-C (2.29%)

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