The programming language Ada rose to 9th place in the TIOBE Programming Community Index in July, unseating the similarly venerable Fortran. Fortran’s drop to 12th place raises questions about whether new languages will unseat older ones.
The TIOBE Programming Community Index shows trends in programming languages based on search engine volume.
Ada reached its highest position on TIOBE ever
Following an upward trend since January, it was Ada’s turn to take ninth place in July. Ada reached its highest-ever position on the leaderboard this month. It grew significantly in popularity year over year, climbing from 24th place in 2024.
TIOBE Software CEO Paul Jansen predicted Ada would be the next “golden oldie” language to have staying power in the top 10. “I would put my bets on Ada,” he wrote in the index. “With the ever-stronger demands on security, Ada is, as a system programming language in the safety-critical domain, likely the best survivor.”
Ada is often used in military and other critical or embedded systems. It’s notable for requiring exceptionally little maintenance and making bugs easy to find and remove early in the software lifecycle. However, Ada is a niche language, with a small but steadily growing community of interested programmers.
Programmers continue this spring’s trend of favoring well-established languages
The top seven entries have stayed the same for the last couple of years, Jansen pointed out; they switch positions among themselves but do not fall into the more volatile eighth-to-tenth positions. Eight to 10, though, are usually held by some combination of Visual Basic, SQL, Fortran, Ada, Perl, and Delphi.
The classic languages at the bottom of the top 10 also face competition from newer languages. Kotlin was once in contention to take Java’s spot in 2023; however, spring 2025 saw programmers flocking to the most proven technologies. At the same time, Kotlin’s popularity has declined because it’s no longer the best choice for Android development.
“Where are Rust, Kotlin, Dart, and Julia?” wrote Jansen. “Apparently, established languages are hot.”
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