The R language for statistical computing has creeped back into the top 10 in Tiobe’s monthly index of programming language popularity.

In the December 2025 index, published December 7, R ranks 10th with a 1.96% rating. R has cracked the Tiobe index’s top 10 before, such as in April 2020 and July 2020, but not in recent years. The rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language Index, meanwhile, has R ranked fifth this month with a 5.84% share.

“Programming language R is known for fitting statisticians and data scientists like a glove,” said Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe, in a bulletin accompanying the December index. “As statistics and large-scale data visualization become increasingly important, R has regained popularity.”

Jansen noted that R is sometimes frowned upon by “traditional” software engineers due to an unconventional syntax and limited scalability for large production systems. But for domain experts R remains a powerful and elegant tool, and continues to thrive at universities and in research-driven industries, he added. Although data science rival Python has eclipsed R in terms of general adoption, Jansen said R has carved out a solid and enduring niche, excelling at rapid experimentation, statistical modeling, and exploratory data analysis.

“We have seen many Tiobe index top 10 entrants rising and falling,” Jansen wrote. “It will be interesting to see whether R can maintain its current position.”

The Tiobe Programming Community Index bases language popularity on a formula that assesses the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses, and third-party vendors pertinent to a language. Popular websites including Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Bing, and more than 20 others are used to calculate its ratings.

The Tiobe index top 10 for December 2025:

1. Python, 23.64%
2. C, 10.11%
3. C++, 8.95%
4. Java, 8.7%
5. C#, 7.26%
6. JavaScript, 2.96%
7. Visual Basic, 2.81%
8. SQL, 2.1%
9. Perl, 1.97%
10. R, 1.96%

The Pypl index analyzes how often language tutorials are searched on Google. The Pypl index top 10 for December 2025:

1. Python, 26.91%
2. C/C++, 13.02%
3. Objective-C, 11.37%
4. Java, 11.36%
5. R, 5.84%
6. JavaScript, 5.16%
7. Swift, 3.53%
8. C#, 3.18%
9. PHP, 2.98%
10. Rust, 2.6%