This might come as a surprise to you but C has been the fastest growing language in 2017. Yes, the oldtimer language is awarded the Programming Language of the Year 2017 award because of highest growing percentage in the TIOBE index .
According to a report published by TIOBE,
“The C language gained 1.69% in 2017. Usually this is not sufficient to become language of the year, so C has actually won because there were no outstanding alternatives. C had a rating of more than 17% at that time and lost more than 10% after that in the next 18 months. A possible reason for this revival is that C is very popular in the growing manufacturing and machine industry (including the automotive market).”
TIOBE Index is an indicator that ranks the programming languages based on their popularity and reach, such as – the number of skilled engineers, search engine hits, and third-party vendors etc. The index is updated every month, however, C is chosen as per the statistics of the annual growth of each language.
At the second and the third place were occupied by Python (+1.21%) and Erlang (+0.98%) respectively. However, the most significant fall is -3.06%, seen in the popularity of Java. Here is a glimpse of the top-chart.
Source: www.tiobe.com
The report also states that “the most interesting jumps forward in the TIOBE index in 2017 were R (from 16 to 8), Erlang (from 44 to 23) and Kotlin (from 89 to 39). Promising languages such as Julia, Hack, Rust and Kotlin were not able to hit the top 20 or even the top 30.”