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Open Source TypeScript Cracks Top 100 in TIOBE Programming Language Popularity Report

• By David Ramel
• June 26, 2018

For the first time, the open source TypeScript programming language has cracked the top 100 in the TIOBE Index, one of the leading popularity rankings.

Microsoft unveiled TypeScript five years ago, providing a superset of JavaScript with optional typing functionality. It compiles to plain JavaScript and runs on any browser, host or OS.

"This month TypeScript debuts at position 93 in the TIOBE index top 100," the June TIOBE report said. "The Microsoft language has been tracked for a couple of years now, but although its popularity in industry seems high, it never made it to the top 100. So finally it has got sufficient traction to be noticed.

"TypeScript is a strict superset of JavaScript, which means you can use it together with your existing JavaScript. But it adds a lot of extra type safety to the JavaScript language thanks to type annotations. In this sense it is an improved version of JavaScript. The fact that Google adopted TypeScript next to its own JavaScript variant language Dart is proof that TypeScript has a bright future."

Microsoft-backed programming languages in general fared well in the latest TIOBE report, with Visual Basic and R also jumping up in the rankings.

Overall, the June report showed a relatively stable top 10 compared to last year, with one notable exception being R, moving up four spots to claim No. 10.

While R is also open source, the company Revolution Analytics provided commercial support for the language in its own Revolution R distribution, and in 2015 that company was bought by Microsoft, which integrated the language into its Visual Studio IDE.

Visual Basic (classic, as opposed to VB.NET) moved up three spots from No. 16 last year to No. 13 this year.

Here's the TIOBE Index June top 20:

Here's the official description of the index:

The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.