Programming Language Diversity On the Rise

jfruh writes: "As GitHub becomes an increasingly common repository of project code, the metadata for projects saved there can tell us a lot about the state of the industry. In particular, a look at the programming languages used over the past half-decade shows an increasingly fragmented landscape, in which the overall share of most major languages is on a slight decline, while less-used languages are seeing modest growth in usage."

Comments

A good sign

[amn108]

Well, isn't it what we wanted pretty much - "right tool for the job" and all that?

I think it is a good sign!

Re:A good sign

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Hear. Hear. Add in the approximately 4 bazillion "frameworks" and the 9 bazillion JavaScript libraries and you've got the programming Tower of Babel.

Re:A good sign

[hax4bux]

Yes, learning another language is not hard. And to use your example, if most languages are more alike than not, why do we need another one? It's all just riffs on the same core.

I am working (until Friday) w/a group of children who download every shiny thing on the internet and throw it into production. The result is chaos and they are rather proud of it. Amazing to watch, impressive if it worked. It doesn't work, and they spend a lot of time tinkering. Oh, well. Someday they will discover girls and have better things to do. I hope.

Re:A good sign

[Anonymous Coward]

Last job, I had to my "core" programming in java (which I knew) and javascript (which I didn't) while also doing maintenance on PHP, VB and C# (ditto). Learning them was not a problem. Constantly switching IDEs, or editors, idiosyncrasies, and libraries certainly was.

Re:A good sign

[Anonymous Coward]

"new platforms like GitHub have totally changed how people develop open source projects"

Sure have. Now it's next to impossible to find good code in the sea of pointless forks.

Re:Selection bias much?

[Sarten-X]

Yep C++, C, Objective-C, and C# are not popular?

Not by a number-of-new-projects metric. They're popular in the "build a giant flagship product" world, but by sheer number of projects, I'd expect them to be pretty small. They're not the kind of language where you can just slap pieces together and do a job, like Ruby, Python, or Perl tend to advocate. Rather, they're elegant for larger projects. A comparison by lines of code would show the C family in a much more favorable light.

CSS is a programing language?

Yes. It's not Turing-complete, but it's still a language for defining instructions.

Re:GitHub's language ID can be misleading

[Trepidity]

Using a git submodule just to throw in jquery.min.js is a bit overkill. Especially since it has no real advantages besides fixing GitHub's statistics.