Python: Still #1 But Showing Cracks

Python hit a peak TIOBE rating of 26.98% in July 2025, then slid to 21.81% by February 2026 still a commanding lead, more than 10 points ahead of any rival. The AI boom is both Python's biggest strength and the source of its modest decline: as more developers enter tech specifically for AI, they learn

Python first, but then branch into TypeScript for web projects, diluting Python's overall share. The correlation between Python's growth and AI-related search queries is nearly perfect, per TIOBE's own CEO.

On the ecosystem front, 2026 started with some genuinely exciting releases. Astral the team behind the blazing-fast uv package manager shipped ty, an ultra-fast type checker now in beta. The pitch is simple: do for type checking what uv did for dependency management. Django 6 also landed, and there's a notable pre-PEP proposal from two Python core devs to introduce Rust into CPython itself, citing memory safety and fearless refactoring as the main motivations.

The most interesting Python story right now is its relationship with Rust. Rather than competing, Rust is quietly becoming Python's performance engine about a quarter to a third of all new native extensions on PyPI are now written in Rust. Libraries like Polars, Pydantic v2, and Ruff have normalized this pattern. Python handles orchestration and business logic; Rust handles the bits that need to be fast. It's an elegant division of labor that may define the Python ecosystem for the next decade.