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

[TheGratefulNet]

not when you start to have too many tools.

part of your value is being experienced in a language. you can't do that if you are spread thin amongst too many.

yeah, we can all -learn- new languages. sometimes its fun, but it stopped being fun for me decades ago (I'm a greyhair). at this point, its more of a headache to have to support this or that fad language if someone decides to write some key bit of code in his favorite. I was just thru this a few months ago, having to support a guy's code in a fad language and no one else in the company had any time spent on this language; yet this fix needed to be done yesterday.

I'd error on having 3 languages in the shop and that's about all that you'd need for most things. beyond that, you really fragment people, support and everything suffers.

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.

This is great news

[SuperKendall]

Competition results in better organisms, and this is equally true in programming languages as it is in life...

Honestly amazing things can now be done in a variety of languages. And it's better mentally to learn a number of languages so the variety helps to create more seasoned programmers in the long run.

Selection bias much?

[bsdasym]

Github as a yardstick for language usage tells you nothing beyond what the most popularly used languages for github hosted projects are. Publicly accessible github projects at that.

Re:Selection bias much?

[ArcadeMan]

My own research also indicates that Atmel microcontrollers are used by 100% of Arduino users.

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.

Eh.. not really

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure this tells us much about the state of the industry. More like the state of the industry for projects that are allowed to have the source posted online. In my area at least, the popularity of tags on StackOverflow seems to be a better indication of the industry: http://stackoverflow.com/tags

GitHub's language ID can be misleading

[Trepidity]

For example if you have a Python project, but it has an example web demo, and the web frontend for the demo uses jQuery, suddenly you have a giant pile of JavaScript code in your repository. So much of it that GitHub often identifies the project as JS, even though it's really a Python project that just has a JS library buried in the examples/ directory.

Of course in some ideal world you wouldn't have third-party library dependencies actually checked into your repository. But it's common to include any JS libraries your HTML documentation/demos/etc. need, because that lets the HTML be viewable and work correctly straight out of the repository (including offline).