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Computer science · Curated list
Programming languages: the 30 most written about
PHP, C, Python and 27 more, ranked by how much of the world has written about each one.
- Entries
- 30
- Photographed
- 16
- Fetched
- 2026-09-25
Programming languages, ranked
Most written-about first. Each description summarises the language's Wikipedia article, which its name links to.
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Python
General-purpose programming language
A general-purpose, high-level programming language built for readable, simple code that is easy to write, using meaningful indentation, a large standard library ("batteries-included") and garbage collection. It supports several programming paradigms, with most weight on dynamic typing and object-oriented programming.
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JavaScript
High-level programming language
Often shortened to JS, a programming language that is one of the Web's core technologies, together with CSS and HTML. Brendan Eich created it in 1995; Ecma International's TC39 technical committee maintains it, while WHATWG and W3C maintain the Web APIs that go with it.
Wikidata · Photo: Lionel Rowe, CC0
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C++
General-purpose programming language
A general-purpose, high-level programming language created by the Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup. First released in 1985, it extended the C language with object-oriented (OOP) features, and later grew considerably with the addition of functional programming features.
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C Sharp
General-purpose programming language
A high-level programming language for general use that supports multiple paradigms. It takes in static and strong typing and lexical scoping, and supports component-oriented, object-oriented (class-based), generic, functional, declarative and imperative programming.
Wikidata · Photo: Tacsipacsi, Public domain
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SQL
Relational database programming language
Structured Query Language (SQL), a language for a specific domain, used to manage data, above all in relational database management systems (RDBMS). It is especially suited to structured data: data that holds relations between variables and entities.
Wikidata · Photo: :User:SqlPac , modified by Ferdna, CC BY-SA 3.0
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Perl
Interpreted programming language first released in 1987
A dynamic programming language, interpreted, high-level and general-purpose. Its name is not officially an acronym, though several backronyms are used, among them "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language".
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Pascal
Programming language
A procedural, imperative programming language designed by Niklaus Wirth to be small and efficient, and to encourage good programming habits through data structuring and structured programming. It is named after Blaise Pascal, the French physicist, philosopher and mathematician.
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Lua
Lightweight programming language
A lightweight, high-level programming language supporting several paradigms, designed mostly to be embedded in applications. It runs on many platforms because the interpreter for its compiled bytecode is written in ANSI C, and it offers a fairly simple C application programming interface (API) for embedding it.
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Visual Basic
Microsoft's programming language based on BASIC and COM
Often shortened to VB, and sometimes called Classic Visual Basic or VB6, a third-generation programming language derived from BASIC, together with the integrated development environment (IDE) that goes with it. Microsoft developed it for Windows; it is known for rapid application development (RAD) of programs with graphical user interfaces (GUI), for event-driven programming, and for using and building components through Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM).
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Assembly language
Low-level programming language family
Often just called assembly, or abbreviated ASM or asm, any low-level programming language whose instructions correspond very closely to the machine code instructions of the architecture. Usually one statement stands for one machine code instruction (1:1), but most also support constants, comments, macros, assembler directives, and symbolic labels for things like registers and memory locations.
Wikidata · Photo: Swtpc6800 en:User:Swtpc6800 Michael Holley, Public domain
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COBOL
Programming language with English-like syntax
A compiled computer programming language, designed for business, whose syntax reads like English. It is imperative and procedural, and since 2002 object-oriented as well.
Wikidata · Photo: The original uploader was דוד שי at Hebrew Wikipedia ., CC BY-SA 3.0
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Lisp
Programming language family
Programming languages forming a family that goes back a long way, recognisable by a prefix notation in which everything is in parentheses. First specified in the late 1950s, it is still widely used, and of the high-level languages in common use only Fortran is older.
Wikidata · Photo: UEU, Iñaki Madariaga, CC BY-SA 4.0
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MATLAB
Numerical computing environment and programming language
A proprietary numerical computing environment and programming language supporting several paradigms, from MathWorks. It handles matrix manipulation, plotting of data and functions, implementing algorithms, building user interfaces and working with programs written in other languages.
Wikidata · Photo: Nuno Nogueira ( talk ), CC BY-SA 2.5
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Ada
High-level programming language first released in 1980
A high-level programming language, structured, imperative, object-oriented and statically typed, influenced by Pascal among others. Built into the language are design by contract (DbC), non-determinism, protected objects, synchronous message passing, tasks, explicit concurrency and extremely strong typing.
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R
Programming language for statistics
A programming language for statistical computing and visualising data, widely used in data science, data analysis, bioinformatics and data mining.
Wikidata · Photo: TrantorFr ( talk ) 23:48, 22 July 2010 (UTC), GPL
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Haskell
Functional programming language
A purely functional programming language for general use, statically typed, with lazy evaluation and type inference. It pioneered several language features, among them type classes for operator overloading that is type-safe, and monadic input/output (IO).
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Go
Programming language
A compiled, statically typed programming language, high-level and general-purpose. Ken Thompson, Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer first designed it in 2007; it was announced publicly in November 2009, and Google develops it together with contributors from the community.
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Scratch
Programming language learning environment
A visual programming language built from blocks, high-level, together with a website, designed chiefly as a teaching tool for children, with a target audience aged 5 to 16. On the website users build projects through an interface of blocks.
Wikidata · Photo: Screenshot is own work, Scratch is by MIT and other contributors, CC BY-SA 2.0
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Rust
General-purpose programming language
A programming language for general use that puts the stress on memory safety, concurrency, type safety and performance.
Wikidata · Photo: Caleb Stanford, CC BY-SA 4.0
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Kotlin
General-purpose programming language
A statically typed, high-level programming language for general use that runs on many platforms and has type inference. It is built to work fully alongside Java, and the Java virtual machine (JVM) version of its standard library relies on the Java Class Library.
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ALGOL
Family of programming languages
A family of imperative programming languages first developed in 1958. It strongly influenced many later languages, and for over thirty years it was the standard way the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) described algorithms in textbooks and academic sources.
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Swift
Apple's general-purpose, open-source, compiled programming language
A compiled programming language, high-level, general-purpose and multi-paradigm, that Chris Lattner created in 2010 for Apple Inc.; the open-source community maintains it. It compiles to machine code through a compiler based on LLVM.
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Visual Basic (.NET)
Object-oriented computer programming language
Visual Basic (VB), first called Visual Basic.NET (VB.NET): an object-oriented programming language supporting several paradigms, developed by Microsoft and implemented on the.NET Framework, Mono and.NET. Microsoft launched it in 2002 to succeed its original Visual Basic, whose last version was Visual Basic 6.0.
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How this list was made
Every Wikidata item that is a programming language, or a kind of one, and that has its own English Wikipedia article, ranked by the number of Wikimedia sites with a page about it — Wikipedia's language editions, mostly, and sister projects such as Wikiquote. That counts how many communities independently thought it worth describing, and nobody can buy a place on it. The top 30 are shown.
Removed by hand
Wikidata files these under this list's query, but they are not what the list is about:
- Cascading Style Sheets — A style sheet language, which describes how a page looks, not a programming language.
- XML — A markup language, not a programming language.
Fetched from Wikidata on 2026-09-25. Each description is this site's summary of the entry's Wikipedia article, which its name links to: the wording is ours, the facts are Wikipedia's, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. To correct an entry, correct it there; the next refresh carries the change.
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