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C Beats Java As Number One Language According To TIOBE Index
mikejuk writes "Every January it is traditional to compare the state of the languages as indicated by the TIOBE index. So what's up and what's down this year? There have been headlines that C# is the language of the year, but this is based on a new language index. What the TIOBE index shows is that Java is no longer number one as it has been beaten by C — yes C not C++ or even Objective C."
Am I the only person seriously wondering how Bash went from position 72 to 20? Bash is in the top 20 programming languages... Something is wrong with the programming universe
thx, bye.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Specifically the platforms. The boom in mobile devices all having varied hardware requires C glue for each one to let the managed stuff run. The mobile boom has ironically been a new hardware boom causing an old software boom.
You would be surprised how many mission critical embedded systems - are still being written in C
Go C!
Actually, Go has some catching up to do on C.
Ezekiel 23:20
Not really. While I agree that C is a bad language, it has no competition in low-level coding. With embedded systems gaining ground, more and more people will start to use it. Although C++ could take its role and it even fixes many of its shortcomings (e.g. namespaces), it's very easy to misuse, so most project leaders don't trust their collegues with it. What would people switch to? Forth, Pascal?
Using the TIOBE methodology, I deduce that the following activities are more popular that C Programming:
- Abduction by alien
- Going to prison
- Dying
Exactly. When you are working in a resource constrained environment, and you want to be able to accurately predict what machine instructions will be generated from your source code, you use C. It's faster to code, and more portable than assembly language, with almost all of the control. Typically maybe 5% or less of your application needs to be really, really fast (interrupt handlers, DSP code, special communications or math or encryption libraries). You might code these in assembly, and the rest in C.
But if you're starting new big applications for the PC in C, you're probably insane.
Seriously, for the last fucking time, can we stop posting on Slashdot random shit picked up from TIOBE? The TIOBE index is so completely and utterly full of fail that I can't believe people are STILL clinging onto it as evidence of anything whatsoever.
It shouldn't be traditional to do anything with TIOBE, except perhaps laugh at it or set it on fire.
So once last time, one final fucking time I'll try and explain to the 'tards who think it has any merit whatsoever why it absolutely does not.
We start here, with the TIOBE index definition, the horses mouth explanation of how they cludge together this table of bollocks they call and "index":
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition.htm
First, there is their definition of programming language. They require two criteria, these are:
1) That the language have an entry on Wikipedia
2) That the language be Turing complete
This means that if I go and delete the Wikipedia entry on C, right this moment, it is no longer a programming language, and hence no longer beating anything. Apparently.
The next step, is to scroll past the big list of languages, to the ratings section, where we see that they state they take the top 9 sites on Alexa that have a search option, and they execute the search:
+" programming"
Then weight the results as follows:
Google: 30%
Blogger: 30%
Wikipedia: 15%
YouTube: 9%
Baidu: 6%
Yahoo!: 3%
Bing: 3%
Amazon: 3%
The first problem here is with search engines like Google, I run this query against C++ and note the following:
"About 21,500,000 results"
In other words, Google's figure is hardly anything like a reasonable estimate because a) Most these results are fucking bollocks, and b) The number is at best a ballpark - this accounts for 30% of the weighting.
The next problem is that Blogger, Wikipedia, and YouTube account for 54% of the weighting. These are all sites that have user generated content, as such you could literally, right now, pick one of the lowest languages on the list, and go create a bunch of fake accounts, talking about it, and turn it into the fastest growing language of the moment quite trivially.
To cite an example, I just ran their query on English Wikipedia for the PILOT programming language and got one result. A few fake or modified Wikipedia entries later and tada, suddenly PILOT has grown massively in popularity.
The next point is the following:
"Possible false positives for a query are already filtered out in the definition of "hits(PL,SE)". This is done by using a manually determined confidence factor per query."
In other words yes, they apply an utterly arbitrary decision to each language about what does and doesn't count. Or to put it simply, they apply a completely arbitrary factor in which you can have no confidence of being of any actual worth. I say this because further down they have a list of terms they filter out manually, they have a list of the confidence factors they use, and it takes little more than a second to realise massive gaps and failings in these confidence factors.
For example, they have 100% confidence in the language "Scheme" with the exceptions "tv", and "channel" - I mean really? the word Scheme wouldn't possibly used for anything else? Seriously?
So can we finally put to bed the idea that TIOBE tells us anything of any value whatsoever? As I've pointed out before a far better methodology would at least taken into account important programming sites like Stack Overflow, but ideally you'd simply refer to job advert listings on job sites across the globe - these will tell you far more about what languages are sought after, what languages are being used, and what languages are growing in popularity than any of this shit.
Finally I do recall last year stumbling across a competitor to TIOBE that was at least slightly better but still not ap
oh no you don't
my friend told me to visit go c before
i'm not falling for that one again
C is a bad language to the extent that it lets do what you want, even if that means shooting yourself in the foot. A language that would marry C's strengths while providing safeguards against buffer overruns and other ills would be an oxymoron.
If you have a section of code that is particularly time critical, you could write it in assembly as many people do. I prefer to actually write it in C but check the assembly output from the compiler, and optimize the C source until I am happy with the result. In all cases I have been able to achieve my objectives this way without actually having to insert a block of assembly (not all compilers let you do that in-line). The resulting code is still very easy to read (for me down the road or anyone else) while being efficient.
C is not the Swiss army knife of software (even though if one language qualified, C would be the closest), but it has its areas of expertise. In the world of small embedded systems, there is simply no alternative worth considering (and few alternatives available.)
For desktop applications, not so great (and I speak of experience.)
Not to mention the number fo songs written in C. In particular, C# is a real pain with all those black keys.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.