An interesting headline on TIOBE for November 2017 underlining the globally rising interest in the statically typed languages. Some good points raised why this may be. Excerpt below.

In any case it should be taken with a pinch of salt seeing Scratch came before Visual Basic and Objective-C :)

TIOBE Index for November 2017

November Headline: What happened to the scripting languages?

There has been a time that dynamically typed languages, also known as scripting languages, were the future. Easy to write, easy to run. Why do you need to declare a variable before you can use it? Why do we have to use all these type annotations all the time? As a consequence, languages such as Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby were very popular in those days.

Today is a different story. Only Python is going strong. The other scripting languages are gradually moving out of the top 20. What happened? Most errors in scripting languages occur run-time. They show up when a program is run. Despite the fact that one can write all kind of unit tests to compensate for this, it remains quite dangerous because such errors might happen while running the application in production. Since quality demands are getting higher and higher, hardly anybody dares to write a critical and large software system in a scripting language nowadays. Even a scripting language such as JavaScript that is inevitable while doing web programming was forced to evolve to a safer language. Microsoft introduced a typed version of JavaScript called TypeScript and all kinds of frameworks such as Angular and React were developed to safeguard the language (and also add extra functionality).

On the other hand, the statically typed languages responded to the threat of scripting languages by reducing their type verbosity: it all started with the "var" keyword in C#, followed by type inference in Java and auto specifiers in C++. And this is how the big languages always seem to survive: by cherry picking the nice and promising features of their competitors.

Nov 2017	Nov 2016	Change	Programming Language	Ratings	Change
1	1		Java	13.231%	-5.52%
2	2		C	9.293%	+0.09%
3	3		C++	5.343%	-0.07%
4	5		Python	4.482%	+0.91%
5	4		C#	3.012%	-0.65%
6	8		JavaScript	2.972%	+0.27%
7	6		Visual Basic .NET	2.909%	-0.26%
8	7		PHP	1.897%	-1.23%
9	16		Delphi/Object Pascal	1.744%	-0.21%
10	9		Assembly language	1.722%	-0.72%
11	19		R	1.605%	-0.11%
12	15		MATLAB	1.604%	-0.36%
13	14		Ruby	1.593%	-0.39%
14	13		Go	1.570%	-0.43%
15	10		Perl	1.562%	-0.80%
16	26		Scratch	1.550%	+0.47%
17	17		Visual Basic	1.489%	-0.43%
18	20		PL/SQL	1.453%	-0.06%
19	11		Objective-C	1.412%	-0.83%
20	12		Swift	1.389%	-0.65%