juliatrend.github.io

Julia Language Ranking Trend

(Updated: January 13, 2019)
Welcome to edit/update

Abstract: According to TIOBE, Julia entered into the Top-50 list in September 2016 for the first time and climbed to 37, the highest rank up to now, in March 2018. The latest rank is 37 in January 2019.

1. Introduction

Julia is a high-level general-purpose dynamic programming language that was originally designed to address the needs of high-performance numerical analysis and computational science, without the typical need of separate compilation to be fast, also usable for client and server web use, low-level systems programming or as a specification language.

Work on Julia was started in 2009, by Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral B. Shah, and Alan Edelman who set out to create a free language that was both high-level and fast. On 14 February 2012 the team launched a website with a blog post explaining the language’s mission. Julia 1.0, the first longterm stable version, was released on 8 August 2018.

Since 2012, the user number and package number keep on increasing. In order to give an overview of the popularity the trend, we collect the historical language-rank data from TIOBE and RedMonk, after it first enters Top-50 in Sep, 2016. Hope it could be help the users to understand the popularity trend of Julia. Data complement and correction are welcomed.

2. Language Popularity Trend

There are many websites/organizations rank the popularity of the programming languages according to different indexes and evaluation methods. TIOBE and RedMonk are two of the popular websites, which are selected as the data source to show the popularity trend of Julia.

2.1 Trend According to TIOBE

Table 1. Julia rank and rating value from Sep 2016

Month	Rank	Ratings	Important Event	Note
Sep, 2016	47	0.196%	Release V0.5	First time entering Top50
Jun, 2017	–	–	Release V0.6
Nov, 2017	–	0.600%
Dec, 2017	47	0.439%
Jan, 2018	47	0.226%
Feb, 2018	50	0.189%
Mar, 2018	37	0.301%		Highest rank till now
Apr, 2018	44	0.195%
May, 2018	46	0.342%
Jun, 2018	43	0.281%
Apr, 2018	44	0.195%
May, 2018	46	0.342%
Jun, 2018	43	0.281%
Jul, 2018	>50	–
Aug, 2018	50	0.156	Release V1.0
Sep, 2018	39	0.242
Oct, 2018	43	0.191%
Nov, 2018	40	0.230%
Dec, 2018	44	0.188%
Jan, 2019	37	0.296%		Highest rank till now

As the marketing/percentage of Julia is still small, the ranking would not be so robust and fluctuation is normal.

The ranking and rating value graphs are as follows. TIOBE_rank|690x459
Figure 1 Julia Ranking (TIOBE)

TIOBE_index|690x470
Figure 2 Julia rating value (TIOBE)

2.2 RedMonk Rank

The following table shows the Julia Rank in RedMonk.

Quater	Rank	Important Event	Note
2014-Q1	62
2014-Q2	57
2015-Q1	56
2015-Q2	52
2016-Q1	51
2016-Q2	52
2017-Q1	52
2017-Q2	40
2018-Q1	39
2018-Q2	36

ooo|690x460
Figure Popularity trend according to RedMonk

ooo|690x460
Figure 3 Popularity trend according to GitHub and Stack Overflow (Noted: the data is measured manually from the following figures from RedMonk.)