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."

Comments

Re:c-derived languages?

[onefriedrice]

Except that this is about new open source projects. I doubt there are so many open source iPhone projects to tip the scales that much.

Re:Just because PHP is popular

[RegularFry]

The question is, is the time you would have saved by seeing the type errors earlier more or less than accounted for by the development speedup that was gained by using Python rather than C++ in the first place? The second question is, was that time more or less than the time taken in creating a test suite?

These are fairly well-covered arguments, so there's little to be gained here other than to realise that static typing only saves you from some sorts of errors, it's always possible to have dynamic-type errors in a static system, a proper test suite should be able to cover both, and a decent test suite takes significant effort and discipline to get right. It's just one of those trade-offs. TANSTAAFL.