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Any study can be turned to favor whatever you want it to say. Want to see real number check out http://langpop.com/ The funny thing is that in most every case C beats out C++, C#, and Swift (Which is so low it doesn't even show up.)

Gee, could there be a reason for that? "Last data update: Fri Oct 25 17:17:19 -0400 2013" - Maybe that?

I have nothing against Java either, but I think making it web-facing has been something of a disaster from a security standpoint. And let's face it, security isn't a high-priority feature up until you're breached, and then it becomes a critical feature. If you disable the Java web plugin on the client, the language itself really has a lot going for it. If it didn't, so many programmers wouldn't still be using it today - according to some rankings, it's the most popular language right after C, and just before PHP and Javascript.

Fortunately, given the fact that we have dozens of reasonably popular languages to choose from, and even more obscure ones, we don't have to pick one language to do everything. In fact, it's downright silly to think that one language ever could do it all. The reason we have so many languages to begin with is because there are so many diverse programming challenges and environments in the modern world, and every language has specific strengths and weaknesses.

I use Java apps all the time and there is no different between native apps and Java apps. Incomplete list of Java apps that I use: VisualParadigm, Eclipse, FreeMind, ArgoUML. JEdit is quite popular, just like Netbeans.

"Java is just a pig, with its jitting, memory hogging, heavyweight thread locks, etc, etc."

Sure, whatever.

Java is one of the most popular languages, topped only by C, and sometimes ASP.NET and PHP.
http://langpop.com/
http://w3techs.com/technologie...

C# pioneered lambda's.

Ridicule of this has not been sufficient.

Your geek cred has been zeroed. Please turn in your membership card and leave the premises.

Before you go, please note that JavaScript, almost 10 years older than C#, has had lambdas from day one, and I don't believe any other language that has done more to expose the common programmer to lambdas. Eich took some if his design inspiration from Scheme, in which lambdas are central. Scheme, a LISP dialect, goes back to the mid seventies, perhaps before you were born.

C# is a fine Microsoft language, but it had nothing to do with pioneering lambda.

And the index you cite is a laugh. It had Apple's brand new Swift language floating around in the type 10 last month, gone this month. Search engine query frequency is not a terribly meaningful measure. All it means is that those interested in a given language have done a lot of searches, and that fluctuates with events such as press releases.

Over here is a little more comprehensive study of programming language popularity. As you can see, C/C++ give up nothing to C#. Not a damn thing.

Maybe it's time to have an alternative to tiobe.

There's an alternative.

here are more realistic non-Apple biased list, your Objective-C pushed way done into the fringe where it belongs. Anyone who has been around in IT knows Objective C doesn't even come up outside of Apple development (and really there aren't many of those compared to finance, engineering, healthcare and web developers in the world

http://langpop.com/
http://blog.codeeval.com/codee...

I probably insult people more than they deserve, but you somehow managed to read a post telling you to look something up and somehow, without looking things up, assumed that there is only one index of programming language popularity. Or something. It is unfathomable how you could reach such a deep level of stupidity. Like, do you practice it in the mirror?

In any case, here is another language popularity website. There are others. I am not someone who will claim to be always right, but 99.99% of the time I will be right over someone who doesn't check their facts. I wish people like you would check your facts, then the conversations around here would be so much more interesting.

Yes, I've heard that LuaJIT might be faster than Node.JS, though I haven't seen any definitive benchmarks. If true, it won't be a huge order-of-magnitude difference as it is compared to Ruby.

Seems that the Node Package Manager has a large collection of modules already, and is growing very quickly. JavaScript itself is vastly more popular than Ruby or Lua, so it makes sense that its leading server-side implementation would get a lot of attention from module developers in the near future. (And the popularity of JS is usually greatly underrated, because people don't call it by a consistent name when talking about "Web scripting", "AJAX", "EcmaScript", "SSJS", "Node", "JScript", "Apple Dashboard Widgets", "Firefox add-ons", "Google Apps Script", etc.) Node.JS is still inching toward that 1.0 version, which would send a signal to a lot of people that it's ready for serious use.

I'm not here to make any "point" against Ruby, just to present my current opinion and ask why people choose Ruby over the alternatives, particularly Node.JS.

--libman

(sorry if this is double-posted - slashdot is choking)

Perl is way faster. Like twice as fast. Check out my test:
% time (echo | ruby)
( echo | ruby; ) 0.01s user 0.00s system 91% cpu 0.016 total
% time (echo | perl)
( echo | perl; ) 0.00s user 0.00s system 84% cpu 0.007 total

Though this is ruby 1.9.3. I don't think 2.0 is twice as fast as 1.9.3.

But I've looked at ruby syntax a bit and it looks like it might have the advantage perl has for quick ad hoc text parsing but an overall cleaner syntax.

What I don't care a lot about is fancy pants modules like rails. If I want to do something serious there's python.

If you're happy shredding text with perl, I see no reason to change. If you're happy doing serious work with python, I see no reason to change.

Ruby is a, dynamic, duck-type OO language with closures, exceptions, and a debugger.
It has nice library infrastructure: http://rubygems.org/
It is generally a little less popular than Python and Perl, depending on your yardstick: http://www.langpop.com/

There are a few implementations of ruby, including one in java (with great bridging to java classes), one for iOS (with great bridging to iOS libraries), and one based on .net (with great bindings there). So if you have a particular target platform, one of those may interest you.

But here's the cononical answer to your question:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonVsRuby

You might be interested in JRuby and Jython and their ability to communicate...

I code in Ruby for a living (Rails), and I think it's a really fun language. Which is something a fair number of rubyists say, and which is something you don't hear a lot of other folks say about their language of choice. For what that's worth...

Sure, we can try different methodologies. Here we see that Ruby comes behind PHP, Javascript and Perl on the normalized comparison.

Anyways, it's just too opinionated, from his 4 examples - PHP, JS, Python, Ruby - only PHP and JS are really widespread, with Ruby still rather rare and Python somewhere inbetween.

And then there's this pearl:

From TIOBE http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html :
6. PHP
8. Python
10. Javascript
12. Ruby

From LangPop http://langpop.com/ :
4. PHP
5. Javascript
6. Python
10. Ruby

Just for the record. Certainly they are all very popular languages.

C is withering and dying? Isn't it still used more than any other language: http://langpop.com/

C typically comes out fairly high in language popularity metrics. So anyone who says "C is dead" probably hasn't looked at much data, and is making things up.

I'm a bit surprised that while a number of people have pointed out how lousy Tiobe is as an index of popularity, that nobody's pointed to an alternative. I'd suggest langpop.com as a considerably better alternative.

The most obvious points of superiority are simply documenting what they actually measure and how they combine the individual measurements to produce a final result. Although Tiobe doesn't document enough of what they do well enough to be sure, it looks like langpop.com covers a couple of types of sources that Tiobe doesn't (or at least doesn't imply they try to cover). One particularly interesting point is that they attempt to gather data about actual code, not just questions about code (e.g., they look at Freshmeat, ohloh, and Google Code).

Oh, and no, I'm not affiliated with Langpop.com (or Tiobe) in any way.

Please check your facts by looking at the following data:
* http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
* http://langpop.com/

Hahahahahahahaha. TIOBE and langpop are not "facts" or "data". They are fun exercises in trying to extract information from search results, but the idea that they are remotely reliable is simply ludicrous.

It is a fact that Java is one of the most widely-used languages around today. Nearly all the software on the smartphone in my pocket was written in Java, for example! But don't go trusting the likes of TIOBE just because they got one thing right.

Also expect a the annual few-percent rise in Java usage in the New Year as new teams are formed and projects are kicked off. Java doesn't get much good press anymore because it is as reliable and ubiquitous as electrical infrastructure (although the Slashdotters after 'Teh New Shiny' and 'More Esoteric Featurz == betterer' would have you believe otherwise, althoguh they usually have never used their darling trend-language on huge multi-year projects with large teams).

Seems you're right about the popularity of languages - according to http://langpop.com/, C/C++ is the leader (which makes me happy, because I use it too). Although I'm quite suspicious about this kind of popularity charts - mostly because of the data source (search engines, not real projects). I've studied statistics (I have a degree in it), and I guess I could easily tweak it to get Visual Basic to the first place.

I've judged the popularity by my experience, and (probably limited) view of projects. I work in enterprise / banking, and most of the projects here are Java-based. And I don't think that's going to change - maybe they could develop new projects on something else, but they have to maintain the current systems so they need Java developers. And when you have in-house Java developers, it's cheaper to develop new projects in Java too (otherwise you'd need more developers or developers who know both, and that's more expensive). And the banks generally like to have the whole stack from Oracle (including database and application servers) from Oracle, so switching just the application layer won't help them much.

The Oracle approach is very different from Sun. Sun was an engineering company, Oracle is doing business. I may not like it, I see myself as an engineer, so I did naturally like how Sun did it, but in the end it was not very successful.

And I don't see any fault on Apache Foundation side. The fact that there is a pool of projects and various vendors can sell support, that's actually the very idea behind the open-source business model. Yes, Oracle can bundle that with their stack (and since they bought Sun they actually have everything they need), but the other vendors could do the same. The real culprit here is the JVM - with enough patents, Oracle can club to death any attempt to create an alternative JVM. But in that case, the open-source ecosystem will fall and something else will emerge.

Be careful to not confuse 'apple' and 'pc' with the entire processor market. There is a huge market for microprocessors and ARM is just the most successful, mainly because of their excellent lineup of developer tools. The power efficiency came second.

Think about it, are there more microwaves in the world, or more PCs? I don't know the answer, but every one of those microwaves have a microprocessor. There are lots of uses for microprocessors. The Apple Newton was only ever a small sliver of the microprocessor market.

Which brings up a story of a guy I heard, who went to a conference about Microprocessor in the early 70s. The presenters were quite enthusiastic about the potential, so much that someone sarcastically commented, "What are they going to do, put them in doorknobs?" A couple decades later, the guy was staying in a hotel for a conference in the same city, and indeed, they had put microprocessors in the doorknobs. Remember that C is still one of the most commonly used languages, probably because of embedded projects.

The langpop site has quite a good set of charts, including Google Code and Freshmeat: http://langpop.com/

Did not found any up to date stats on sourceforge, the only statistic circling around is very dated (2006): http://wismuth.com/lang/languages.html

you're just trying to scare us ... right? ... right?

I really can't think of a lot of coding that would usefully be done with a more 'expressive' character set. The output of the code often has to be expressive but that isn't the same.

The most popular programming languages are Java, C, C++ http://langpop.com/ They aren't popular because they are easy to use. They are used because they are effective. The innovative languages are well down the list.

You can read many reasons why the more innovative languages are better; in theory. C is either the most popular or second most popular language. There's a reason for that. Theory be damned.

Hmmm, let me see...

* hardware wise my 3yo MBP still outruns most machines in the office (ignoring the fact its personal hardware)
* os wise it's just as good as Linux (usually use Ubuntu)

So the old mac addage doesn't really hold up.

As for java... http://langpop.com/ and look at what's the most popular....

To quote Scotty - use the correct tool for the job... not "Start using a proper programming language" bollocks...

Really? I don't know what planet you're on, but here on planet earth, much of the real work is being done in Java (by a very wide margin). (See http://www.langpop.com/ ).
Haskell and Erlang are barely a blip on the radar. I like and use Python regularly and it has it positives, but I have a hard time recommending it to my corporate customers (for various reasons having to do with availability of trained developers, performance and or broad industry support). By and large most work I see getting done is being done in Java or .Net languages.
I can see why you posted as AC since clearly this was intended as flamebait.

Yes, Java core language is stagnating. Even JDK7 has not much new features.

I disagree. Java is evolving at a reasonably steady pace and while each subsequent release is not as radically different as its previous as in some newer languages, this is to be expected since the language is already fairly mature. Its usage however, is ever expanding.

http://langpop.com/

If you check out the link above, you can see that C# is considerably behind Java in popularity (its even behind old standbys like C, C++, PHP and Perl) which makes me wonder where the "java is dead" crowd are getting their information. Technologies like LINQ/PLINQ are great, but very proprietary in a world that doesn't have to be tied to a specific platform. Why tie yourself down to proprietary extensions when perfectly viable alternatives exist? If MS were to open-source .Net and/or LINQ, then maybe they would stand a chance of being generally accepted, and maybe even incorporated into later versions of open source language environments, but corporate IT departments more and more are beginning to realize they don't have to be held hostage to proprietary technologies (it's taken a long time, but I see it happening every day and I for one, welcome it).
Almost every third party corporate application that I've seen implemented over the last 3-4 years has been based on Java, and most of them contain open-source libraries at their core. The richness of the available java libraries and open-source components makes developing applications from scratch unfeasible from a cost perspective. What better platform to develop in to take advantage of this vast array of pre-existing, pre-tested code than Java (or one of it's offspring such as Scala)?

I think my own http://langpop.com/ is better, as I use various metrics (jobs, books, etc...), and also let the user play around with the normalized results. I am fairly confident in my results, but on the other hand, I think "oh, look, C just passed Java" is a giving them a precision that they simply don't have.

http://www.langpop.com/ begs to differ.

To clarify I do think that C# is a good language. This is why I referred to it as "a rival to both Java and C++".

I have already addressed the document and standards issue in another post, http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1170319&cid=27289561

Currently Windows is losing share of the OS market. This makes getting locked in to a windows only language something to avoid if you can. I agree with use the right tool for the right job but the story is about what language he should learn for a job not what language to use for a single project. The 'job' in this case is to give the person the best tools for the future. With other OSes getting a foot hold in the market I think that cross platform languages are a better bet.

From the sound of it the UK is far different then the US http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/programming-language-jobs-and-trends http://www.langpop.com/. As you can see Java is in huge demand around here.

Again C# is a great language and MS has done many things right with it. But if you are just getting started I think it's a good idea to steer clear of it.

I think my own project has a little bit better methodology:

http://www.langpop.com/

However, all of these things have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Perfect stats are impossible. However, I think that even imperfect stats can give you a good glimpse of what's going on. This is my own attempt at doing so, which I think is a bit better than TIOBE's in that I track more things:

http://www.langpop.com/

Hopefully, I'll have trend data up there soon as well.