The C programming language family is some of the most popular on the planet. Just looking at the TIOBE Index, we see that C, Objective-C, C++ and C# are all in the top five with their rankings not changing in over a year. Those who look deeper into these things predict that C’s time in the spotlight may be coming to an end, however, thanks to some rising stars.

Andrew Binstock over at Dr. Dobb’s recently penned a blog post that argues the dominance of C may be threatened in the coming years. By using a variety of programming language indexes, including the TIOBE Index, he points out languages meant to replace C and C++ have been on the rise over the last year.

For starters, D, a language meant to replace C++, climbed to the 18th spot on the TIOBE Index over the last year. It began in the 35th spot in January of 2013. Binstock speculates that D’s rise in the chart may be due to Facebook engineers adopting the language. C++ may also be on the decline thanks to developers moving around from desktop development to mobile where C++ is rarely used.

As for C, Google’s Go programming language is the biggest threat facing the world’s most popular programming language. According to the TIOBE Index, Go is currently sitting at 36th place, but it’s rank is expected to climb in 2014. Binstock says that C will also face threats from Mozilla’s Rust and Nimrod in 2014, but he doesn’t expect its popularity to wane too much.

So, what about Objective-C and C#? For Objective-C, Binstock expects it to remain popular due to Apple requiring iOS developers to use it. For C#, he feels that it could become more popular among .NET developers in the coming year.

Image via TIOBE