The programming language SQL hit 12th place in the TIOBE Programming Community Index, its lowest position since the rankings began in 2001. Although SQL remains a critical language for working with databases, the increased use of NoSQL databases for AI applications has begun to take its market share.
The TIOBE Programming Community Index shows trends in programming languages based on search engine volume.
SQL doesn’t fit for AI databases
“SQL will remain the backbone and lingua franca of databases for decades to come,” said TIOBE Software CEO Paul Jansen in the TIOBE Index. “However, in the booming field of AI, where data is usually unstructured, NoSQL databases are often a better fit.”
NoSQL, with its data interchange formats such as JSON and XML, is less static than SQL, he said.
SQL’s popularity has been in decline since February. It had 1.9% in TIOBE Software’s proprietary points system in May and 1.55% in June.
“NoSQL’s popularity is comparable to the rise of dynamically typed languages such as Python if compared to well-defined statically typed programming languages such as C++ and Java,” Jansen said.
SQL had a somewhat unusual journey in the TIOBE Index. In 2004, due to debates about whether SQL counted as a programming language at all, Jansen removed it from the index. In 2018, it was pointed out to Jansen that SQL was Turing complete, and so should be listed as a programming language on the index. Because it was used so much in databases, SQL returned to the top 10.
Assembly Language may drop out of the top 20
In other news from the TIOBE Index, Visual Basic and Delphi/Object Pascal both rose in popularity year-over-year. Assembly Language may be on its way out of the top 20, dropping from 13th to 19th year-over-year and from 0.97% to 0.91% between May and June.
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