The &quot;top programming language&quot; award is, confusingly, <i>not</i> the highest-ranked or most popular language. It&#x27;s the language that has the greatest delta in popularity.<p>It just so happens that this year, Java is #1 in both popularity increase and popularity overall.<p>Final note: take all language rankings with a grain of salt. The methodology is never perfect, nor universally agreed-upon.