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Programming Language Diversity On the Rise

Posted by Soulskill on from the digital-melting-pot dept.

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."

5 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Selection bias much? by bsdasym · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Selection bias much? by Sarten-X · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
  2. Eh.. not really by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  3. Re:A good sign by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
  4. Re:A good sign by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 5, Insightful

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