IEEE Spectrum Ranks the Top Programming Languages

An anonymous reader writes Working with computational journalist Nick Diakopoulos, we at IEEE Spectrum have published an app that ranks the popularity of dozens of programming languages. Because different fields have different interests (what's popular with programmers writing embedded code versus what's hot with web developers isn't going to be identical) we tried to make the ranking system as transparent as possible — you can use our presets or you can go in and create your own customized ranking by adjusting the individual weightings of the various data sources we mined.

Comments

Not a ranking of what is the best language

[Meshach]

But more a ranking of what are the most talked about / downloaded / popular.

Re:Not a ranking of what is the best language

[Samantha Wright]

...And somehow, HTML is both on the list and lower than Java. Anyone got any theories?

Re:Not a ranking of what is the best language

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML is a markup language, not a programming language. Jscript is the typical programming language associated with it.

Amazing that people still mix these up.

GIGO

[BasilBrush]

Whether with programming languages or with studies it's the same: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Select mobile, and you'll find Objective-C listed 16th, 6 places after MATLAB, and two places after Visual Basic. Which is clearly nonsense.

We already have tried and tested (back to 1989!) rankings for this. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...
And Objective-C is currently number three across the board, never mind just mobile.

Re:GIGO

[iggymanz]

here are more realistic non-Apple biased list, your Objective-C pushed way done into the fringe where it belongs. Anyone who has been around in IT knows Objective C doesn't even come up outside of Apple development (and really there aren't many of those compared to finance, engineering, healthcare and web developers in the world

http://langpop.com/
http://blog.codeeval.com/codee...

Re:GIGO

[phantomfive]

Select mobile, and you'll find Objective-C listed 16th, 6 places after MATLAB, and two places after Visual Basic. Which is clearly nonsense.

lol you're reading the results wrong. Read the instructions where it says 'click to hide'. Objective-C turns up in 16th place if you disable mobile.

So yeah, you're right, that is clearly nonsense. :)

Re:GIGO

[Xest]

"I said data. An anecdote is not data."

Yes it is, but that's besides the point, because don't worry, I know what you meant, you meant that an anecdote isn't as important a piece of data in your view, as TIOBE.

But here's the problem, TIOBE's methodology is so less than useless that I'm not sure it is better than an anecdote. Go read how they figure out their rankings - they take results from pages where content is mostly user generated and weight the result based on the amount of traffic that site gets. This means that user generated content sites like Wikipedia, and Blogger are being used to determine language popularity such that you can massively boost the ranking of a low down language by spuriously creating blogs and Wikipedia entries so forth including mention of it. There are many problems with this alone including the fact that they're reliant on the quality of the search functionality of the site in question to help with the weightings and we all know how pointless even Google's search results rapidly decline to after only a couple of pages.

It then gets worse. They apply arbitrary exemptions, they for example preclude Objective-C from searches on C to ensure it doesn't pollute the results but they don't filter out things like C sharp, meaning there are many thousands, possibly millions of results about C# polluting the rankings for C. They try and also give arbitrary confidence ratings, but the methodology for determining these seems to be completely made up and unpublished.

"There's well over a million apps on the iOS app store. The overwhelming proportion of which use Obj-C."

Most apps seem to get written using things like C# (i.e. in Unity, or MonoGame) or Javascript and HTML5 in tools like PhoneGap. The amount of native development on both iOS and Android is an absolute minority of all development.

When someone points to TIOBE to try and back up a claim you might as well replace "TIOBE" with "The Daily Mail" or "Fox News" or "The Register" because they're all equally full of shit.

This index actually looks pretty decent and quite realistic. It's based on stats that, unlike TIOBE, don't lie (at least not quite so much) like job listings - i.e. what companies are actually hiring for, in other words, what business is really actually using, an actually useful metric because most people looking at such rankings want to know popularity for the purpose of employment. I wont say it mirrors exactly my experience and view of the job market, but also I recognise that my experience is always going to be much more localised than a global study. I know Python is popular but I find it odd to see it above C#, however I guess there's every possibility it's used more prominently in other countries and cities so I don't think the ranking's results are far outside the realm of possibility.

It's certainly a much more realistic index than TIOBE, there's absolutely no doubt about that whatsoever - it far better mirrors reality for those of us working in the field. TIOBE isn't really much better than just outright making it up.

Don't tell someone you've proved conclusively they don't know what they're talking about when you clearly have not the slightest idea as to what tools and technologies are used for the bulk of mobile development. Even with the popularity of iOS and the vast number of apps it's app store has, much of it is still not written in Objective C regardless.

Re:The Embedded list is the best

[ArcadeMan]

No I didn't. And there's no such thing as "Square-Enix", "Sonic games on Nintendo consoles" or "Star Trek reboot" either.

Now get off my lawn!

How did Java beat C

[Murdoch5]

It's a pretty good list but my only question is how on earth did Java beat out C. Java is a decent language for a lot of different areas but doesn't come to the table in any one area and own the hill. On the other hand C is the king of the embedded world, Operating System world ( such as kernels ) and can still rock it on the desktop with C++ and C#. If C and Java switched places then it would be prefect, until that happens I can't really agree with it.

Re:How did Java beat C

[phantomfive]

how on earth did Java beat out C....... the other hand C is the king of the embedded world, Operating System world ( such as kernels ) and can still rock it on the desktop with C++ and C#.

Because most programming isn't exciting new hip startups, it's not embedded.
Most programming in the world is boring business software. And that is where Java shines, for various reasons. As someone else pointed out, it's like the COBOL of the 21st century.

Re:How did Java beat C

[gnupun]

but my only question is how on earth did Java beat out C

That's like asking why isn't Assembly language on the top of the list? It runs circles around C in the performance area, both in speed and size (important for embedded apps).

Java beats C because you can accomplish more in Java than C with fewer lines of code and less mental effort. Things like exceptions, OO, garbage collection, a massive library, etc. save a lot of time compared to C. Debugging is also relatively painless because you get a stack trace in Java, but not in C.

I too have a few questions:
How on earth did VHDL beat Verilog? I thought everyone in companies used verilog because VHDL was too complex, like Ada.

Why is Julia not on the list? Its syntax is similar to Python but performance approaches C/Java.

Re:Best editor?

[DMUTPeregrine]

Well, it's certainly better than timothy...

IEEE, It's Perl, not PERL

[nick_urbanik]

IEEE shows "PERL" at number 11. IEEE, It's Perl, not PERL.

You forgot the part about

[Latent Heat]

. . . we loaded programs by flipping toggle switches for the binary op-codes until our finger bled. And we liked it!