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Survey Says C Dominated New '08 Open-Source Projects
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."
Seeing as one of the projects mentioned with the most releases was in C#, is it lumping C,C++,C#, etc all under one label?
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
The results really aren't surprising: as TFA states, most projects use more than one language. So C coming out on top with Java #2 is hardly unsurprising: many extensions built for scripting languages use either C or the primary language for the VM they target (Java for the JVM) in addition to whatever scripting language they are for. And JavaScript being tops among scripting languages also isn't surprising; PHP and Ruby may be popular for web applications, but most PHP and Ruby web apps (and web app frameworks) rely on the use of JavaScript on the client side, and so will often also include JavaScript.
PHP has been applied to many large scale development projects, demonstrating that you are incorrect. Don't misconstrue your own preference for one language over another to mean that a language is inferior or unsuitable.
Well, no.
"X has been used for Y" does not demonstrate that "X is suitable for Y".
Our company's flagship product was written 15 years ago. When we did it, we had to choose a language. Nearly considered Pascal and all the other flavors of the month. C has its shortcomings for sure, but all these years later we're still here, it's still well supported and plenty of people know how to write it. Improvements like recompile-while-running, modern debuggers and error trapping have made it a much more productive environment.
Yes. It certainly has its flaws, but I don't think we could have made a better choice. If I had to pick another language to still be active in another 15 years, that would be it.
What the hell does "scripting" even mean? Perl and Ruby are the same class of language as C. Javascript is an entirely different beast. Whoever categorized Ruby and Javascript together must be completely ignorant of programming.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Anyway, here is their actual press release
Thanks for that.
Let's compare "here" with the summary. "Here":
47% of these newly created projects used the C language. Java came in as the number two language of choice at nearly 28%. Third was Javascript at over 20%. In the world of scripting, nearly 18% of the projects chose to use Perl
Summary:
47 per cent â" of new projects last year used C. [...] 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.
I note that 47+28+20+18 > 100, so somewhere there's a move from one "percentage pie" to the next. I would like to know which language is in which pie, and more importantly why, and why there aren't numbers for one big pie with everyone in it. I'd also like to know why the summary (which is taken from the register) and the "here" seem to be ambiguous, when read together, about which pie javascript goes into.
I don't think malice is a good explanation for all of this, so I'll assume incompetence. That goes well with the 98%-of-everything-is-crap law ;)
How can you build anything large-scale in a language too dynamic for proper static verification?
Sometimes large-scale projects in static languages can be small-scale in dynamic. For example look at the ridiculous amount of resources devoted to dependency injection frameworks in Java, where in Python or Ruby those capabilities are essentially built in.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
'But at the same time, show me a large scale project done in PHP, and I'll show you a large scale project that would have been better off in Python.'
With all do respect, I find that most worshipers at the altar of python feel the same way about anything that doesn't require C for the sake of performance.
I realize you guys feel that code should LOOK pretty. But not everyone agrees that you need the language to mandate style and FUNCTIONALLY python is no more capable than Perl (example intentionally chosen to make pythonites cring). For most web projects, php is as capable as either.
Besides, he claimed PHP was unsuitable for large projects not merely that there were better choices. PHP is suitable and demonstrably so. There are languages that aren't, like VB. There are no large projects primarily written in VB for this reason despite the fact that vb was extremely popular.
Three of the world's top 10 websites are PHP-based. Wikipedia, and facebook, along with vast chunks of yahoo.
I'm gonna go ahead and argue that "X has been successfully used for Y by 3 of the top 10 organizations in the Y industry" is pretty solid evidence that "X is fairly suitable for Y". In fact, I think you'd be hard pressed to demonstrate that "X is unsuitable for Y", given the level of success these sites continue to achieve.
WP, Facebook, and Yahoo all have their business problems, but PHP is the least of them.