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JavaScript, PHP Top Most Popular Languages, With Apple's Swift Rising Fast
Nerval's Lobster writes Developers assume that Swift, Apple's newish programming language for iOS and Mac OS X apps, will become extremely popular over the next few years. According to new data from RedMonk, a tech-industry analyst firm, Swift could reach that apex of popularity sooner rather than later. While the usual stalwarts—including JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, C#, C++, and Ruby—top RedMonk's list of the most-used languages, Swift has, well, swiftly ascended 46 spots in the six months since the firm's last update, from 68th to 22nd. RedMonk pulls data from GitHub and Stack Overflow to create its rankings, due to those sites' respective sizes and the public nature of their data. While its top-ranked languages don't trade positions much between reports, there's a fair amount of churn at the lower end of the rankings. Among those "smaller" languages, R has enjoyed stable popularity over the past six months, Rust and Julia continue to climb, and Go has exploded upwards—although CoffeeScript, often cited as a language to watch, has seen its support crumble a bit.
All new languages start out at the bottom, as Swift did.
In time, the ones that don't get used fall down.
Swift has gotten up to 22nd, but the rest of the climb past the stragglers won't ever happen.
However, to be "the most popular language" is clearly no contest worth winning.
Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are most popular compared to Steven Hawking and Isaac Asimov.
Being popular doesn't mean better, useful, or even of any value whatsoever. It just means
someone has a better marketing-of-crap department.
There's a time to have popularity contests. It's called high school.
E
McDonalds may serve billions, but no one is trying to pass it off as gourmet food.
Kind of like PHP and Javascript. The most fucked up languages are the most popular ... Go figure.
* http://dorey.github.io/JavaScr...
More critically, the question I always ask about this is: "Used for what?"
Without that context, why does popularity even matter? For example, I'm a game developer, so my programming life revolves around C++, at least for game-side or engine-level code - period. Nothing else is even on the radar when you're talking about highly-optimized, AAA games. For scripting, Lua is a popular contender. For internal tools, C# seems to be quite popular. I've also seen Python used for tool extensions, or for smaller tools in their own right. Javascript is generally only used for web-based games, or by the web development teams for peripheral stuff.
I'll bet everyone in their own particular industry has their own languages which are dominant. For instance, if you're working on the Linux kernel, you're obviously working in C. It doesn't matter what the hell everyone else does. If you're working in scientific computing, are you really looking seriously at Swift? Of course not. Fortran, F#, or C++ are probably more appropriate, or perhaps others I'm not aware of. A new lightweight iOS app? Swift it is!
Languages are not all equal. The popularity of Javascript is not the measure of merit of that particular language. It's a measure of how popular web-based development is (mostly). C/C++ is largely a measure of how many native, high-performance-required applications there are (games, OS development, large native applications). Etc, etc.
Raw popularity numbers probably only have one practical use, and that's finding a programming job without concern for the particular industry. Or I suppose if you're so emotionally invested in a particular language, it's nice to know where it stands among them all.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
... And not sure public github or stack overflow are really as representative as they want to believe
Yeah.. why is this any better than: ... those are all from the past year on slashdot, and there's loads more.
TIOBE index: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...
This story about python surpassing java as top learning language: http://developers.slashdot.org...
Or this about 5 languages you'll need to learn for the next year and on: http://news.dice.com/2014/07/2...
Next "top languages" post I see, I hope it just combines all the other existing stats to provide a weightable index (allow you to tweak what's most important). Maybe BH can address that :-)
I don't know why the marketing weenies that hire idiots don't just hire competant C programmers and make them transition to the language they want. Then they will get fucking awesome programmers who will be four billion times more productive in any X language than a fuck wit who lied on his resume just to get the job then taught himself the language the weekend before he was due to start from a book which teaches X language in 24 hours.
You have to use the right tool for the job, even if that means learning something new to you. Competent programmers don't make their decisions based on what tools they already know; they make them based on what is the best fit for the requirements of the system or component.
Yes, component. It's not at all uncommon for a well-designed system to be implemented using multiple technologies and languages, each best suited to their piece of the puzzle.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.