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C Programming Language Back At Number 1
derrida writes "After more than 4 years C is back at position number 1 in the TIOBE index. The scores for C have been pretty constant through the years, varying between the 15% and 20% market share for almost 10 years. So the main reason for C's number 1 position is not C's uprise, but the decline of its competitor Java. Java has a long-term downward trend. It is losing ground to other languages running on the JVM. An example of such a language is JavaFX, which is now approaching the top 20."
but shouldn't it really be at number 0?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. -- James Klass
Go ahead, read it for yourself, and tell me how this is supposed to give any meaningful results. They aggregate together things of all kind, to the point where an aggregate doesn't make any sense at all (I mean, hits such as "programming in PHP sucks" or "you must be an idiot to write production code in VB" would count as +1 for PHP and VB, correspondingly!). You can have one language having many job postings, another having many books, and yet another having many basic "how to?" questions and dumbed-down tutorials, and they'd all get the same rating.
In any case, most certainly, at these numbers (Java 18.051%, C 18.058%), speaking of one overtaking another is completely pointless, given the margin of error.
Anyway, if you want to know how popular a particular language/technology is, the simplest - and much more accurate! - way of doing so is to check any popular job search web site. Just keep in mind that preferences vary in different regions, so if you are making career choices, stick to local/national postings, and if you want to see an overall worldwide trend, you have to aggregate data from enough sources.
The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings
I feel so much confidence in these numbers.
Your point is?
What I think you're being snide about (how Java still depends on C) is misguided. That's the point - nobody's saying your system programming languages are dead. At the end of the day, something needs to be a straight sequence of 0s and 1s that the processor can just run, and that's where C dominates. There's a lot of things (like scheduling algorithms) that really can't be written in a higher level language, either.
But at this point, the only reasons you'd need to use C would be for low-level systems programming, as a base for another language (interpreter/JIT VM), or anywhere where you *really* need to manage your own memory or get close-to-assembly performance. (not) Coincidentally, this covers just about everything C is used for nowadays. Many small utilities are now written in Python, particularly small accessory GUI programs on Linux.
Fact is, a higher level language like Java is just faster to program in, and for a basic application it's more than fast enough. But we'll never lose C, at least because all these higher-level fancy applications need to run on something, and nobody wants to write that "something" in straight assembly.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
If you use Python, Java or whatever you are too far away from the metal to do the interesting stuff.
That's because they are specifically designed to abstract away the computer hardware.