C# and Java Weekday Languages, Python and Ruby For Weekends?

Dan Lorenc writes "Using the StackOverflow.com data dump, I measured the activity of various programming languages throughout the week. The results: Ruby and Python saw a rise in questions asked on the weekend while C# and Java saw a dropoff in activity on the weekend. This means that more programmers are using Python and Ruby on the weekend for their personal projects, showing that these languages are more fun to use. Show this experiment to your boss the next time you are selecting a programming language for a project at work."

Comments

Grails and Groovy

[Foofoobar]

I'm rediscovering the fun of Java with Grails and Groovy. Groovy takes the best of PHP, Python and Ruby and integrates it into Java and Grails finally creates a framework without a million XML configs. It has made web dev in Java easy and pleasurable.

Bad Conclusion

[malevolentjelly]

Perhaps this only indicates that Java and C# are used more by professionals and Python and Ruby are used more by amateurs. No matter where they work (whether or not they're using Java or C# or even programming at work), it merely indicates that people who use Python and Ruby are active during the weekend.

Perhaps this simply means that Python and Ruby are more popular with amateur F/OSS and web developers, something that is so obvious it doesn't even necessitate an article.

Re:What about Perl?

[ducomputergeek]

Depends on what world you're living in. If you're an Unix Systems admin, there is an aweful lot of perl around. Especially if you are doing any type of log analysis. We've used PERL to generate billing reports and other tasks on the backend for years and the same goes for a lot of systems tasks. But recently we've found ourselves going back to PERL for a lot of our web work.

We've just started porting our web-based apps from PHP to PERL because we're moving from PostgreSQL to an Enterprise class database system that has 2 PERL modules that support it and PHP has nothing but ODBC. And our tests show that MOD_PERL with the database DBI module is much faster than PHP/ODBC. Script execution time is slower, but database access time is an order of magnitude better in PERL.

That being said, all of our Desktop GUI interfaces are written in JAVA. We looked at Python and C#, but the local university teaches 4 - 6 semesters of JAVA in their CS department. We can always find someone local to maintain Java based code. Not so much with Python. C# is nice, but JAVA is still write once, run on any desktop. So we don't have to worry if our clients are running Windows, Mac, or Linux. It just works.

Willie Sutton on why he robs banks.

[wdhowellsr]

Willie Sutton, a famous bank robber from the early twentieth century, when asked why he robs banks said, "Because that is where the money is."

I'm a contract .Net C# programmer and the vast majority of jobs available right now are C# and Java. Unfortunately the corporate world follows the mantra, "You can't go wrong with .Net C# or Java".

The same was said of IBM pretty much throughout the seventies and eighties. Hopefully Ruby and Python will start to make some corporate inroads but I don't see it happening any time soon. wdhowellsr

Python Matlab

[stokessd]

I've been making inroads at the (unnamed) aerospace company where I work in getting people to use Python and the pylab and numpy libraries in place of MATLAB. Not only is it free vs. several thousand dollars, but it's faster, more flexible, and makes your teeth whiter. I've been much happier and more productive since I switched.

We also use "R" for a lot of analysis rather than MATLAB.

Sheldon

Re:I think you're doing it wrong..

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I like the view expressed in the preface to Simply Scheme.

There are two schools of thought about teaching computer science. We might caricature the two views this way:

* The conservative view: Computer programs have become too large and complex to encompass in a human mind. Therefore, the job of computer science education is to teach people how to discipline their work in such a way that 500 mediocre programmers can join together and produce a program that correctly meets its specification.

* The radical view: Computer programs have become too large and complex to encompass in a human mind. Therefore, the job of computer science education is to teach people how to expand their minds so that the programs can fit, by learning to think in a vocabulary of larger, more powerful, more flexible ideas than the obvious ones. Each unit of programming thought must have a big payoff in the capabilities of the program.

It always seemed to me that both approaches have their place, and I would also argue that both are sometimes used inappropriately.

Re:Python Matlab

[Manhigh]

I've been preaching the same exact path. Python + numpy + scipy + matplotlib is pretty damn powerful. It would be preferable if matplotlib included 3D visualization, but Mayavi is very good.

My group used to rely heavily on Excel and VBA. When Microsoft dropped VBA support on the OS X version of Office, we were left in a lurch. I'm hesitant to develop a similar dependency on MATLAB.

C and Fortran for anything requiring speed, Python for everything else.

Re:I think you're doing it wrong..

[diablovision]

Brian Kernighan would retort,

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

C++ seems to be language of choice for geniuses to hang themselves these days.