The TIOBE Index, which measures programming language popularity based on data from engineers, courses, vendors, and search engines, has released its rankings for September 2026.
CEO Paul Jansen noted that Julia is close to returning to the top 20. The language first entered this group in the summer of 2023 but was subsequently pushed out.
Julia is actively capturing market share from MATLAB, which has seen its position drop by two places this month. Both languages, along with Python and R, are used for numerical and scientific computing, modeling, and data processing.
Despite its growth, Julia remains focused on niche professional fields and has not yet become a general-purpose language. It was not included in last year's Stack Overflow survey of the most loved programming languages.
The top 10 rankings remain stable, while changes are occurring near the 20th position. Perl and Ruby have fallen out of the top 20, replaced by Ada and Objective-C.
