Java is not among the top 3 most popular programming languages in the TIOBE Developer Community Index. According to Paul Jansen, CEO of TIOBE Software, the growing popularity of C++ is exactly why Java dropped out of the rankings.

“C++ surpassed Java for the first time in the history of the TIOBE Index, which means that Java is at position 4 now. This is the first time that Java is not part of the top 3 since the beginning of the TIOBE Index in 2001”,

said Paul Jansen.

Currently Python is in first place, C in second, C++ in third and Java in fourth. Despite the shift, Java still remains among the most popular programming languages.

But there is still positive news for Java. Research firm Slashdata, in the Q3 2022 version of its State of the Developer Nation report, found that Java has nearly doubled the size of its community in the past two years, from 8.3 million to 16.5 million.

The Slashdata report also notes that Kotlin and Rust represent the two fastest growing language communities, each having more than doubled in the past two years. Kotlin code runs on the Java Virtual Machine, so its rise lifts Java too.

And in a GitHub report on the state of the octopus in 2022, Java ranked third among the top programming languages. It’s no secret that Java took the second spot in 2019. Even if it’s not among the fastest-growing programming languages, Java has its own special section in the report for not succumbing to premature declarations of decline.

And that’s not all. According to a post by co-founder James Governor, major companies such as Amazon, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and now Oracle, are investing heavily in Java in an effort to win enterprise modernization workloads.