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Oh, and here, or more specificly here is one metric reflecting a significant drop in popularity for Perl relative to other languages.

That isn't to say Perl is "bad" or going away any time soon. The huge installed base and extensive module repository ensures its longevity (and even as it wanes a larger job market) but as time goes on fewer new projects (both public and internal) are choosing Perl as the implementation language. It was never particularly strong as a desktop application language - Python seems the leader there - and it has long since been eclipsed by PHP as a web development language.

Perl's strongest area is in it's roots as a quick and often dirty language used by administrators. Unlike developers admins are relatively unlikely to go language shopping and most of the deficiencies of Perl are relatively unimportant for that type of work.

"C# ... is very popular ..."

By "very popular" I take it you mean less popular than Perl or Python, but more popular than Delphi.
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

I took a look at the chart - it's on decline in the standings, but that's only because Python shot up by a huge margin. C# actually increased its mindshare by .75%, which was a pretty big step compared to other languages on the list.

It's not old stats - http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Bang up to date in fact. The thing is that the world of production quality programming is very different to either the slashdot community (always excited over the next Big Thing(TM)) or university (very forward looking, though giving a grounding in current tech).

The world of industry is slow. It's also a hell of a lot bigger than just microsoft windows.

A quick search yielded this site:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Behold, the "coding standards company" whose web site requires javascript.

What a bunch of clowns!

"No, but it is up there with them "

I'm afraid it's not really. They are the top three languages. C# comes in at number 8, after Perl, PHP, Python and VB

Looks like it's down to #8 actually:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Python is growing. Perl is not.
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

(There are other indexes that have a similar conclusion with different methodology if you want to argue about that one.)

Java has be come the most popular language(http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html). CmdrTaco however has hated Java since the summer of 1997 "My hatred for Java has never died since that moment." (http://meta.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/02/1553218). Sun on the other hand is trying to clean up their act(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/25/0236208).

It's been nearly 11 YEARS. I think it's time you bury the hatchet.

1. Java, 2. C, 3. C++, 4. PHP, 5. VB. ("The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors.")

uh. i'd rather use that open source ide eclipse for java development. You know, Java, the .

That's the nice part about running Java on the phone most people don't seem to get. By having the Java wrapper they only have to secure Java from doing anything wrong not try to secure random code that will be running as compiled. Why Java and not C++ or [insert favorite language here]? Because Java came with a wrapper (the JVM) and it's the biggest language right now(This might just sound like me showing a preference but TIOBE backs me up on this. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html).

Gawd, such a waste of white space. Let the holy brace wars begin ...

BTW, for all those elsewhere in the comments who are raving about C$ .... oops, C#, C# isn't going much anywhere in comparison to either java or c or c++, or even vb.

In fact I have many a time whipped off a VB6 app to take the place of a mission critical app that would only run on ancient hardware or an ancient OS. Come to think of it,in all the years I have been out there fixing machines for small businesses I can only think of one that DIDN'T have some VB app that was required to run the business. So say what you will,IMHO Linux should be able to run VB apps without jumping through a bazillion hoops, if for no other reason than the millions of VB apps out there that businesses require to do their work. But that is my 02c from down here in the trenches,YMMV.

Woops, it /. ate my query string example. Here is where they show what they search for.

VB includes the following according to their methodology page:

Basic, VB.NET, Visual Basic.NET, Visual Basic .NET, Visual Basic 2005, VB 2005, Visual Basic 2003, VB 2003, Visual Basic 2002, VB 2002, VB

The methodology page is here.

I don't know. A lot of it depends on what applications businesses are using; a few big companies pushing large Delphi projects could make a big difference.

I think Javascript is also hampered by the fact that there aren't all that many different apps, and that a lot of people do view it as a semi-essential skill, so it gets less play. You don't see HTML up there anywhere.

I'd say that the evidence is that C# and .Net are nowhere near as important as you think. Take a look at TIOBE's language chart. C# is currently ranked 8th overall with only 4.1% of the mindshare. Java, C, and C++ are all well above it.

BTW, Visual Basic (all versions) is currently ranked 3rd with 10.8%. Even if you stipulate that all of those VB users are VB.Net, you're still talking about a grand total of about 15% or 20% (assuming other, smaller languages using the CLR) of the entire global developer community's interest in .Net. Not exactly earth shattering by any means. Nope, I'd say that FOSS can continue to safely ignore .Net. :)

Doubtful. The most widely known index for that sort of thing that I'm aware of is TIOBE Programming Community index, and that has had Java leading by a large margin for as long as I remember.

"I think Python has a small enough user base that they could actually pull it off."

According to this index, anyway, Python has a respectable base and is slightly ahead of Perl. But, yeah, they could pull it off at this point.

There are downsides though, one of the biggest things the J2ee folks have been pushing is to separate the view from the controller and get them fairly code homogeneous. With Rails it is very easy to comingle javascript, html, and ruby/rails DSL in single files. They have some templating too but every rails app I've seen had views with all of those mixed together. This isn't terrible but if you're working on a team with a fairly large app it is almost always a mistake in the longer term. Even though it's "more work" and requires some amount of "repeating your self" abstraction can pay off hugely on large projects over time, it's not a bad thing. Again, if it's your blog or something that will not be in use for that long, why would you care? just make it work and move on.

The use of convention over configuration also makes it easier to do some of the more complicated web dev things, like doing AJAX in an intelligent way, which again adds more sexy to it which helps to make it more popular. In Rails you can fairly easy enable AJAX by doing things exactly like everyone else, j2ee apps all seem to have different ideas and mechanisms to do it which again, makes for more work and possibly more complexity, but also more flexibility, if only you can ever leverage it.

Word is Rails has about peaked in terms of the media hype, here, I'm not sure how credible this is though, if it is accurate then it will be a matter of technical merits going forward. It's clearly changed the rules some. Look at how long struts has been around and still a lot of people don't know how to really use it, the world might have been different if there was a definitive "this is how to use struts" kind of how-to or framework.

TIOBE bases their ratings on the number of search engine queries for "<language> programming'. Maybe it's just me but I don't equate an increase in search engine queries regarding programming in python as indicating an increase in the popularity of python.

Put another way, the number of people looking up information on a language X != the number of people programming in language X.


Never let reality temper imagination

I am a headhunter[...] I have zero interest in kids who have studied "easy" subjects.

To be wise in computers...

You can't know unless you've been developing 8 hours every day after work. Wanna know why? Because every day I work I am 8 hours more knowledgeable in my field than the day before. I doubt you're keeping up with me.

Ah, slashdot, I love you.

"Open-source is not innovative." "Yes it is. Look at these Java tools!" "That's not innovative. We had better than those 20 years ago." "Senseless Java bashing!"

(And the "senseless Java bashing" kneejerk response is rated higher than the observation that we had great tools 20 years ago.)

Gee, 60% insightful, 20% flamebait, 20% overrated. That really pulled an SICP here. There should be a *bonus* for that.

It's amazing how pro-Java slashdot is. If I was to claim that Microsoft was innovative for doing something other platforms did 20 years ago, I'd be modded to -1 in a New York minute (or maybe +5 funny). When somebody says that Java is innovative for doing something other platforms did 20 years ago, it shoots up to +4 insightful, and counterpoints get modded flamebait.

Peter Seibel was right: programmers are just as emotional as anybody, and they care more about looks than functionality, even in programming languages. Unix geeks like Java because it looks like C -- admit it! Other more powerful languages, don't. You can pretty much measure the popularity of programming languages by how much they superficially look like C: on this list, how many of the top 10 languages *don't* use C-style curly braces? I count 2: VB (the primary way to extend apps on the most common OS in the world), and Python (and despite not looking like C, I think the indentation thing makes it obvious that Python people care about aesthetics as much as anybody!). (Disclaimer: I'm a former Python programmer.)

With respect to Tony Hoare: I don't know what the language of the year 2050 will look like, but I know it will have curly braces.

Top marks for your use of persuasive statistics, and the data to back you up is right there on the page!

Are we about to go off the rails?
Danger On The Rails: Railroad won't talk about hazardous chemical cargo
Off the Rails: Big Oil, Big Brother Win Big in the State of the Union
Train breaks world's speed record on rails
Clinton rails against Bush border plan
US destroying Tomcat fighter jets to keep parts from Iran

See, 5 mentions of Rails and only one of Java!

Definitely much more compelling than http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

So, no, we haven't been pushed out of the web market by other lauguages. Thanks for asking. =)

By "being pushed", I meant this was still in the process of happening, and from what I've seen it's not without some evidence. Please don't take this as a flame, or as me putting Perl down. I think it's a great language and is not in danger of dying any time soon. I'm just not so sure about Perl on the web.

The charts here, if they are to be believed, suggest that there may be a downward/stunting trend in Perl's popularity. When you take in to account something like PHP is almost always associated with web development, and Perl is only asometimes associated with that, then the numbers may have a much wider gap than anticipated when talking about web related language popularity. Also, ruby is showing a healthy upward trend. For the moment, most people think rails when they hear ruby. My guess would be that it's upward trend will continue (a 1% gain over a year isn't too shabby). My comment was not meant to be malicious, it's just what I see when I talk to people, and when I examine job offerings. I see tons more offers for PHP, Java and VB, than anything else.

If you have any other statistical sources, that are contradictory, or have a better testing method, I'd like to see them.

C# and Friends are sure mopping the floor with Java. http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

Java? Wide uptake? Surely, you jest.

No, hardly.

It's quite rare now to see any client programs written in Java;

Not in the business world, where Swing clients are probably second only after Visual Basic. Sun is also currently putting a lot of effort into improving the JVM desktop experience.

IBM is a bad example for almost anything. I looked at your "JLINQ" thing - guess what: IBM already has this under another name. J2C. It's been out for 6 years.

c# is still in the doldrums for adoption. Unlike other posters that may claim something without data: Java is still the most widely used language with more than 7x the marketshare of C#.

TIOBE's list of programming language popularity by job offers available. Java mauls everything else.

The most popular programming language on the planet is doomed?

You mean, the Java programs I write that run on Linux, BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Windows, and AS/400 aren't actually working? You should have told me sooner! Maybe you can tell me how, exactly, they're not working, because they seem to be working fine!

Because we hear about buffer overflow exploits in Java programs leaving your machine vulnerable all the time? Oh, wait. We almost never hear about those.

That's funny, it freed me from the Win32 API, and dozens upon dozens upon dozens of other developers I know.

Yeah, right. We'll look back and see how badly Java failed, because it only retained the #1 crown for a few decades (or more).

You need a reality check.

http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm/

Looks like the death-blow for c#?

As another reply joked, this particular API is very nice but is hardly going to be a killer app. Interesting to see though that the predictions of the death of Java a year ago seems to have been rather mistaken. I see a lot of job ads in Sweden asking for Java people now, and this is what TPCI-TIOBE says. Not as popular as the peak 5 years or so ago, but growing marketshare again, and more quickly than the competition.

It's not really a major player.

Reference 1. Reference 2.

Java is a major player. C is a major player. .NET, maybe in a few more years, but I doubt it. They will have to do something truly innovative.

Today, .NET is marketing hype - and as I said, that hype is now getting tired.

My judgment that it's dead-end isn't really so pejorative. It goes for just about everything like it that isn't truly open. I say the same for VB, though they add features to it every year. Sure, MS would be crazy to drop .NET. Right? Never happen. It sounds familiar because the VB guys said the same thing. Look what happened to them.

The landscape is littered with the graves of proprietary systems like these. Most languages we use widely today are truly open. These days the world is finally learning you have to be crazy to hitch your wagon to a single vendor, let alone the world's most notorious. Who wants to have their platform supported only at the pleasure of the king? And you don't have to.

If Microsoft wanted to beat the crap out of Java all they'd need to do would be to put down the patent gun, open up their sources, and let .NET embrace cross platform. They could perhaps out-Java Java.

We both know very well they wont. It's because .NET is not designed to win the language wars or be the best language. It is designed to stop the bleeding from developers breaking out of MS's jail, by providing a new way of locking developers (and their code) into the proprietary Microsoft platform.

"C# sucks, pure and simple. Java is a JOY compared to C#. And yeah, I program in C# at work 90% of the time. If Java would have made it here sooner they would have chosen that language for sure."

See how easy it is to spout off nonsense?

So, do you have anything concrete to say - something I could learn how right you are from? I'll give you some examples.

Here, I'll do some of your work for you. That's a comprehensive, balanced comparison of the language features.

Here and here are some measures by which you can measure the relative popularity of programming languages, the availability of jobs, etc.

Think about your career, man.

And, next time, at least link some MS marketing materials or something.

What do you think of the declining popularity of Java?

They want to create more FUD. I know a lot of shrill voices here don't like Java (sometimes for good reasons, no language is all things), but the JVM is the alternative to CLR/Mono. Check http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm to see what I mean.

Novell produces Mono, and there is now a window where organizations can consider it "safe" to use - safe from patent and other "IP" discrimination. That window may be enough to distract people from the Java/JVM alternative, and if they manage any kind of dominance they can just close Novell's window or maintain them as their pet, and the market could be sewn up. They can harm Linux, Java, and Free/Open software - their biggest competitors - at the same time.

On the list of most popular languages at TRIOB http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm D is 14'th while Eiffel is a tie at 51. Ok triob is not the most accurate representation and doesn't include the years of lecacy code, however it does indicate that D is on the rise.

PS - Well done Ruby, programming language of the year. Moved 11 places, wow.

FYI, my suspicion was confirmed:

"Grouping: Basic, VB.NET, Visual Basic.NET, Visual Basic .NET, Visual Basic 2005, VB 2005, Visual Basic 2003, VB 2003, Visual Basic 2002, VB 2002"

(from http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index/tpci_definition.h tm)

"I think that the Delphi community has shrunk past the point of sustainability, at least in the U.S. When I got my current position, maintenance of a group of legacy Delphi apps, I immediately went looking for the remnants of the old Delphi user group in the Dallas area. I was unable to find any of the members that still used Delphi at all."

Well ish. I don't think the parent was saying MS did a bad job with .NET (or the other products listed). He/she was saying that .NET wasn't much of a Java killer. And it isn't. Around 20-25% of all software development has been done in Java since 2000 or so (see http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm for example) making it the most wildly used programming language on the planet. C#, by contrast, is about 3-5%. Java is holding pretty steady, and doesn't appear to have been affected by .NET at all. You may find some enterprises switching from .NET to Java but equally I know of several who have switched from MS (either .NET or more commonly VB) to Java (and also from Windows to Linux). I personally switched from .NET to Java in 2004 because I wanted a change and I can't say it's a move I regret. Java seems pretty good to me. I use it for a large scale enterprise projects, particularly where Linux/AIX/Solaris is heavily used on the server side, and it works like a charm.

There's no point fighting with Access to try to make it do something it wasn't designed to do, namely large-scale multiuser access to a big database. What you want is an easy-to-use RAD tool with the fastest native database in existence, namely Visual FoxPro 9. It will handle hundreds of users accessing GB's of data with no problem at all. Yes, that's right, FoxPro, and despite VB people saying since 1994 that Fox is dead, the next version will be out soon and it's supported until 2015. Unlike VB6. Also, it's number 12 on the Tiobe list of most popular languages - http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm/ Here's some more reasons why: http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~VisualFoxProBulle tPoints/

The sun/microsoft handling of Java and Java standards did nothing to help its adoption.

Yet, it seems Java is one of the most used languages.
This web site, http://www.tiobe.com/index.htm?tiobe_index (seems to be in netherlands and uses search engines to calculate the ratings) lists:

1- Java 21%
2- C 18%
3- C++ 10%

I use C++, and although that's x-platform, its usage is Windows specific (COM, ATL, etc). That's because I don't need a Mac/Linux version of my software. IFF I did, I'd have to either

- manage my C++ abstractions more carefull to avoid os dependencies
- use Java
- Dare I say it, .net/mono

If I had to make some crystal ball 4 year look ahead, I'd say the MS os dominance will increase the use of JIT languages, especially with the runtimes being included in the os (Vista).

C++/CLI, there.

D is doing OK. Just look at the programming language popularity index at http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm/.

Lately, however, a lot of programmers have moved onto Ruby on Rail

No, they haven't

You are buying into the hype. Apparently a miniscule but vocal minority of people have even heard of Ruby on Rails. Most of them seem to read this site.

OK - how about this?

http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

Seems reasonable to me - shows Python has significant popularity.

Wow.

I think you win an award.

In some paragraphs you have an egregious error in almost every sentence.

Sun can do this to an even greater extent, since they control who is allowed to implement VMs.

No, they do not. They control who can call their Java VM's "Java compliant."

Their standards are 100% proprietary and closely controlled.

No, they are not "closely controlled" - they collaborate extensively through the JCP, and indeed much of Java 5 was defined that way. OS developers like the Apache Group are behind many of the new parts of the spec...

They also protect themselves with patents.

Which their license explicitly grants you the use of, when implementing JVMs...

Microsoft actually has open standards

Unlike MS, who has the option of potentially GPL-incompatible RAND licensing for C# and the CLR, and doesn't standardize the rest of .NET APIs at all... what are you smoking, really?

You are basically saying you can take your .NET app to some other server? Or ever will be able to, at some point in the future? Lies this obvious just make you look foolish.

Sun is in a much better position to lock Java down and prevent people from using it.

So as you can see, this is wrong.

Same with C#.

Except all those class not found errors.... Oops, your API didn't come with you... I guess you don't mind rewriting everything?

Sort of like Sun's constantly changing GUI APIs which become very popular then have support for them dropped, right?

What are you smoking? Seriously? No APIs have been dropped yet. They have added new, never removed the old...

Like COBOL and Fortran, right?

I notice you ignored the point about the spec and the standard and the VM. Not surprising.

C#/.NET is also well specified and even more unencumbered.

So you are aware this is a blatant lie, right?

Oh it's OK. Just point me to the other vendor that implements .NET. Not C#, not the CLR. .NET... Oh wait, you can't! Bzzzzzzzzzzzzt.

And Sun's VM is not open source

Poor reading comprehension. The source is available. Not the same as open source. As I pointed out, it is not FSF or OSI compliant.

GNU classpath implementations have only recently come to a half-decent level of completeness.

The compiler and VM are done for some time. They are doing the entire API, and that is also pretty far along now. Mono is nowhere near this, and you probably even know it.

Hell, even commercial alternatives to Java's tend to be a pain to set up and suck donkey balls.

I had no problem with IBM's system. Actually I didn't have too much trouble with BEA's either. Perhaps you're just bad at it?

What's that thing called? Oh yeah, evidence. When you make bold claims, you better back them up.

I don't think you would recognize evidence if a worm delivered it to your IIS server's homepage. You've certainly overlooked everything I've provided thus far.

Let's see these numbers then. Evidence.

Duh OK. The fact that you don't already know this, though, is by itself basically proof that you're an ignorant fanboy kid who likes to shoot their mouth off without having any idea what you're saying... If you did, you would try to change the subject rather than dig your hole this much deeper: Reference 1. Reference 2.

Unsafe code mixing is RARE and requires you specifically telling the compiler to allow it. But hey, don't let things like facts get in your way.

You say "RARE" and make a childish insult. However I point to Microsoft promoting the practice