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Survey Says C Dominated New '08 Open-Source Projects

Posted by timothy on from the take-that-25-other-letters dept.

svonkie writes "C overwhelmingly proved to be the most popular programming language for thousands of new open-source projects in 2008, reports The Register (UK). According to license tracker Black Duck Software, which monitors 180,000 projects on nearly 4,000 sites, almost half — 47 per cent — of new projects last year used C. 17,000 new open-source projects were created in total. Next in popularity after C came Java, with 28 per cent. In scripting, JavaScript came out on top with 20 per cent, followed by Perl with 18 per cent. PHP attracted just 11 per cent, and Ruby six per cent. The numbers are a surprise, as open-source PHP has proved popular as a web-site development language, while Ruby's been a hot topic for many."

7 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. Black Duck Software? by ChienAndalu · · Score: 4, Informative

    Seriously, who ever heard of that company? Anyway, here is their actual press release, including a bogus list with 10 random apps I never heard of.

    And by the way, Python got 10%.

    1. Re:Black Duck Software? by talexb · · Score: 4, Informative

      From TFA: "Note, most projects used more than one language and these results are based on the number of projects using a given language, not the number of lines of code created."

      There, I fixed that for you. :)

  2. Re:c-derived languages? by DragonWriter · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'd expect that the C family won because of Objective-C; there was a huge amount of iPhone development this year.

    I read TFA but don't have it open, ISTR that there only a small number of mobile projects, and a smaller number of those for the iPhone, on the order of 40, out of the thousands of new projects, so I don't think that Objective-C for the iPhone tipped the balance for the C family, even if they did count the C family as one unit.

  3. Re:no C++ by RedWizzard · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm surprised C++ didn't make the list.

    It didn't make the list because apparently the authors think that C, C++, and C# are all the same language.

  4. Re:c-derived languages? by FishWithAHammer · · Score: 5, Informative

    c# is windows specific

    Wrong.

    --
    "You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
  5. Re:Apples and Oranges by weston · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why throw JavaScript in there? The rest are server-side languages, while JavaScript is client-side.

    Two reasons I can think of:

    1) An increasing amount of number of applications are being delivered via the web browser
    2) JavaScript increasingly lives a number of other places besides the browser. See Rhino, JScript.NET, Seed, and probably a few other places I'm not thinking of right now.

    --
    Tweet, tweet.
  6. Re:c-derived languages? by shaitand · · Score: 5, Informative

    'As for me, I don't discount any solution just because of who comes up with it, so I'm fine with .NET. To each his own.'

    *shrugs* We must agree to differ then. I prefer to learn from history. Historically speaking, there haven't been any useful Microsoft technologies that were or are completely interoperable, stable, relatively bugfree, and secure. Seeing as how they have released lots of technologies and solutions over the years they have had plenty of opportunities and have on numerous occasions even lied about the aforementioned things.

    Maybe .Net is/was/will be the exception. If so I'm not concerned, there are other solutions that DO meet the above criteria and work well. All in all, my track record of avoiding Microsoft solutions when something else will do will then have been the right choice about 99 out of hundred times and saved me thousands of dollars in license, support, and training costs. ;)