C# 14, the latest Long Term Support release of the .NET language was released this week as part of .NET 10. Currently in fifth position in the TIOBE Index rankings it looks set to overtake Java and it certainly deserves to.

The TIOBE Index is measure of the relative popularity of programming languages and so that fact that C# has been in the news for the successive betas and pre-release candidates prior to the release of C# 14 may have bumped up its percentage share in the last few months. Meanwhile while C# has been increasing its TIOBE rating, Java, having been overtaken by Python in 2021 has been in decline ever since.

Commenting on the TIOBE Index for November 2025 Paul Jansen, CEO of TIOBE Software and the instigator and maintainer of the Index writes:

Until recently, nobody could beat the growth figures of Python. But now, Python seems to have plateaued. Instead of Python, programming language C# is now the fastest rising language. If C# can keep this pace, it might even become the TIOBE programming language of the year 2025. 

Only two years ago C# achieved this very accolade, which requires having the largest year-on-year increase in its share of the rating. Between January 2023 and January 2024 it saw an  increase in its rating from 5.73% to 7.16%, a positive change of 1.43%. Now its rating has increased to 7.65% which is an even bigger change of 2.67%.

Jansen also asks the question: 

Is C# going to surpass Java for the first time in the TIOBE index history?

pointing out that the difference in rating share  between the two rivals is less than 1%. In fact it is 0.89% and back in January 2024 it was even smaller at 0.71%, prompting Jansen to write:

C# is eating market share from Java and is getting more and more popular in domains such as web application back ends and games (thanks to Unity). C# can be used free of charge and evolves in a steady pace, making the language more expressive every new release. C# is here to stay and might even surpass Java soon.

So does C# deserve to overtake Java? My answer to this is a resounding "yes". As a relatively young language, first released in 2000, it isn't weighed down by the baggage that hampers Java.

Now that it is open source, C# is no longer tainted by its association with Microsoft. Rather it benefits from that very association since Microsoft supports the open source community. It is also now platform-independent, just like Java, and it is arguably easier to use because it requires far less boilerplate code to get simple tasks done. It is, however, important to realize that despite its name it really doesn't share much with C or C++ apart from being a block=structured languages. C# is object-oriented and, rather than this being a bolt on extension like C++, it is a modern implementation of pure object-oriented ideas. 

The changes introduced by C#14, summarized in this slide from its launch at .NET Conf, serve to make it an even stronger competitor.

As to its position vis-a-vis Python, its big drawback used to be that it was object-oriented from the word go. There was no way you could ease yourself into C# by avoiding its object constructs. Today this is more possible as you can write C# that looks a lot like a scripting language - though I don't think that this has caught on as it has with Python. 

Do I think that C# will overtake Java in terms of usage and jobs?

No I don't, but this is more a measure of how much legacy code, systems and Java programmers there are. C# just doesn't have the same inheritance, even if you take into account that it was once Microsoft's number one language.  

•  Mike James is the author of Deep C#: Dive Into Modern C#, in which he provides a “deep dive” into various topics that are important or central to the language. 
  

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TIOBE Index

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