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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."

3 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. Re:c-derived languages? by daknapp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Which it shouldn't, as C, C# and C++ seem pretty distinct.

    And what about Objective-C?

  2. Re:c-derived languages? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    C is very popular for cross platform programs especially open source that don't rely on much platform specific code (c# is windows specific and c++ has some issues if you are not very careful).

    But yeah, c should not count for c++ and c#. Their syntax may be similiar but they are approached and programmed quite differently (their are other languages with similiar c syntax so but they are not lumped in).

  3. Re:Black Duck Software? by jonaskoelker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 ;)