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C/C++ Back On Top of the Programming Heap?
Drethon writes "On this day in 2008, a submission was posted that C/C++ was losing ground so I decided to check out its current state. It seems that C has returned to the top while Java has dropped by the same amount, VB and PHP have dropped drastically, C++ is holding fast but now in third place and Objective-C and C# have climbed quite a bit. 2008 data thanks to SatanicPuppy: 1. Java (20.5%); 2. C (.14.7%); 3. VB (11.6%); 4. PHP (10.3%); 5. C++ (9.9%); 6. Perl (5.9%); 7. Python (4.5%); 8. C# (.3.8%); 9. Ruby(2.9%); 10. Delphi (2.7%). The other 10 in the top 20 are: JavaScript, D, PL/SQL, SAS, Pascal, Lisp/Scheme, FoxPro/xBase, COBOL, Ada, and ColdFusion."
C and C++ are two separate and very different languages.
So is Lisp in some sort of state of perpetual undeath then?
My two favorite languages aren't dying!
Yes, Perl and Ruby combined have twice the share of python. It's really more like 20 times, since you can get ten times as much done in a single line of perl.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Of this list, C#, Ruby, and Python are clearly the best languages as far as I'm concerned.
;)
The C++ longevity is expected. Every engineer worth his weight in salt should be able to write C++ code. (get off my lawn etc.)
I am curious abobut where the C growth is coming from. Embedded stuff? Native libraries for the increasing volume other higher level languages?
The Windows OS kernel is mostly in C with some assembly (just like Unix/Linux/BSD/OSX). The Windows GUI is mostly C++ (but so is KDE).
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Probably has something to do with it's buzz being 'underground' and its benefits being widely refuted?
From the article: "Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written." [Emphasis added]
It's a survey, no more, no less. Using it to make decisions about your career is foolhardy at best.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
It's unbelievable that people still pay any attention whatsoever to it. Some company comes up with a ridiculous 'methodology' to gauge the popularity of languages, and people assume that it's actually related in any way to reality.
Further reading:
The best place to start is at TIOBE's own methodology description page: http://bit.ly/h3ftBa
No need to go much beyond that, to figure out that it's a meaningless index. To save you the reading, it more or less boils down to this:
---
The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines. The search query that is used is
+" programming"
---
That's all.
Still need some more convincing:
Why TIOBE isn't all that useful (mild): http://bit.ly/IeG0yA
The TIOBE index is being gamed: http://bit.ly/IeGnt1
It's no short of ridiculous. Time to stop paying attention to it, move along!
My impression is that Java will eventually relegated purely to in-house software, for large companies that are heavily invested in Oracle. Most of the goodness of Java comes from the Java API's, and these are on a legal battle. Most OS's are already not including the platform by default. At the end, for independent software companies, and specially for small shops, it feels too risky to invest one's time in learning or keeping up with a language that is controlled by a suing-happy company. As much as I despise Microsoft's ways of polluting languages (remember J++?), I think they are orders of magnitude more trustworthy than Oracle.
Sure. As soon as someone comes up with a language that produces code that runs half way as fast as C on any OS, and that at least pretends to integrate with the rest of the OS. You know, make it nice for everybody else other than developers. Oh, here's a though: how about developers get their heads out of their butts and learn how to be programmers, instead of whining that real languages don't do everything for them?
A shout goes out to this site which actually does a pretty good job of comparing all the languages on 'subjective' attributes such as "I find it easy to write efficient code in this language" (C being top here), or "Code written in this language tends to be verbose" (Cobol and Assembler are worst here, but Java is 3rd place, and that's bad considering it's meant to be a modern higher level language).
You can even click each language and see what comment it is best for. For example, Haskell is top for "This language has a strong static type system" and "When I write code in this language I can be very sure it is correct". Meanwhile, something like PHP is top for "I am sometimes embarrassed to admit to my peers that I know this language" and "This language has many features which feel "tacked on"".
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
The site was loading very slowly so I scraped the 2012 rankings for the curious but impatient:
1 - C - 17.555% .NET - 0.978%
2 - Java - 17.026%
3 - C++ - 8.896%
4 - Objective-C - 8.236%
5 - C# - 7.348%
6 - PHP - 5.288%
7 - (Visual) Basic - 4.962%
8 - Python - 3.665%
9 - JavaScript - 2.879%
10 - Perl - 2.387%
11 - Ruby - 1.510%
12 - PL/SQL - 1.373%
13 - Delphi/Object Pascal - 1.370%
14 - Visual Basic
15 - Lisp - 0.951%
16 - Pascal - 0.812%
17 - Ada - 0.783%
18 - Transact-SQL - 0.760%
19 - Logo - 0.652%
20 - NXT-G - 0.578%
Given the prevalence of SQL injection attacks, which could be prevented with a single function call, I have to say that buffer over-(and under-) flows are really a red herring. Unless a language makes it literally impossible to write insecure code, lazy and bad programmers will find a way.
A pocket knife doesn't implicitly create objects or fail to cleanup if you forget to make your destructor virtual.
C++ has very complex rules that take years to hone and understand correctly, and even then mistakes are easy to make. The proof is that even today when you go to C++ forums people are still asking about obscure language rules while in Java forums the conversation has moved on to issues of design. Nobody needs to discuss the meaning of language constructs in Java because they are obvious.
It isn't however obvious that an error in your cannonical class definition could cause this code to create a memory leak:
a = b;
Clearly proper use of a tool is important. But tools without safety features are more likely to cause accidents.
now that C++ will get move semantics
Not will, _has_ move semantics. As of last August.
...since you can get ten times as much done in a single line of perl.
Yes and you will be the only human on earth that knows what it does.
Hammer - Obviously perl. Technically, you can do absolutely anything with it, but sometimes the results will look like hell. Swiss-Army Chainsaw makes a good second tool choice for perl.
Phillips screwdriver - Obviously Ruby. The mythology is both came from Japan, although phillips doesn't sound very Japanese, in ye olden days stuff made in America had slot screws and stuff made in Japan had philips screws, so obviously phillips came from Japan. Also more ruby is probably being written outside Japan than within, now a days, but I still hear people claim Ruby is japanese.
Just fill out a physical plant request form in triplicate and get your boss/mom to sign and your bosses boss to notarize - Obviously the hyperverbose business languages like cobol and java where hello world takes 3 pages and an hour of explanation.
Plumbers helper / plunger - Obvious GDB reference
Table saw - Obvious assembly language reference. Works great and fast, until you cut your hand off and it makes a mess of the project.
Having trouble finding analogies for the rototiller and the roofing nailgun. Please advise...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It isn't just Oracle. IBM is more heavily invested in Java than the owner themselves. Google too. Between those 3, you can't possibly avoid Java or think that it will continue to drop in the Enterprise space. Just not going to happen.
Might as well start off writing it all in assembly, since compilers don't always produce the fastest possible code.
Actually, things are advanced to the point where with very rare exception a human writing assembly is almost certainly not going to produce the optimal approach anymore. First, compliers represent the result of the best and brightest and trial and error for optimizing code structures into streams of assembly that are frequently counter-intuitively faster than a person is likely to think of on their own. Secondly, prcossor manufacturers tend to get their latest and greatest instruction sets into compilers, and trying to keep up with those dynamics would be implausible for a human writing special purpose code.
So manually writing in assembly is no longer always faster in practice and in fact usually slower. I don't think the same claim can be made of any particular managed language compared to C/C++.
Although I will agree that language choice *usually* matters far less than algorithmic choices and occasionally people jump to a language change in a project to alleviate slowness only to end up not significantly better than they started because of glaring design problems that dwarf the language performance concerns.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
There is definitely movement away from Java and toward C/C++ for some types of software. Applications bottlenecked by memory performance, like databases and high-performance codes, will often be faster than a language like Java by integer factors. When people assert that Java is about as fast as C/C++ they are talking about code like tight, CPU-bound loops. However, Java is wasteful of memory and CPU cache lines in a way that C/C++ is not under normal circumstances which has a significant adverse impact on the performance of some codes.
On recent processors, memory performance is a bigger bottleneck than CPU performance for performance-sensitive codes. The throughput of CPUs has grown faster than our ability to keep those CPUs fed from memory. In the supercomputing world this started to become evident years ago; memory benchmarks like STREAM became more closely correlated with real-world performance than CPU benchmarks like LINPACK for a great many algorithms. The resurgence of C/C++ is partly driven by this reality since it makes memory optimization relatively straightforward and you can receive large gains relative to Java for modest effort.
A smaller but also important driver away from Java is the GC. The increasing focus on "real-time" and predictable latency for applications like analytics and database engines is complicated when Java's garbage collector is inserted in the middle. This is a chronic point of pain for some applications.
I developed Java for years but my latest project (a real-time analytical database engine) is being written in C++ for the above reasons, among others. Writing high-performance applications of this type is actually pretty painful in Java because you end up doing unnatural things in the language to even approach the efficiency of conventional C++. Anecdotally, many of our C++ developers were doing Java until recently so the statistic does not surprise me.
...since you can get ten times as much done in a single line of perl.
Yes and you will be the only human on earth that knows what it does.
That's why we call it a "write-only" programming language.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...And as with most language standards standards, that actually means that a developer can safely begin to use the new feature in portable code starting around the year 2025.
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