Slashdot Mirror
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.
Below the line are languages that are more popular on GitHub. Above the line are languages that are more popular on Sewer Overflow. There's a distinct difference. The "GH" languages tend to be systems languages (Go/Rust/D) and CS favorites (Haskell/OCaml/Erlang). The "SO" languages tend to be more lightweight and application-specific - Visual Basic, Matlab, ColdFusion. "Assembly" seems to be an outlier, but other than that the pattern seems pretty consistent. Conclusions about the audiences for the two sites are best left as an exercise for the reader.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
McDonalds may serve billions, but no one is trying to pass it off as gourmet food.
But if you want to learn a skill that will almost certainly get you a job somewhere, then learning to flip burgers is a pretty safe way to ensure a job (quality of job not considered).
This type of popularity *does* have a purpose and implications and value. It's good to know. You still need other factors before you make your decisions, but it's a valuable one. It'd be nice if the various indexes had a page that also allowed them to be cross referenced and weighted to produce new calculated scores (ex. pay scaled by a factor of 1.5; lines of code in the wild scaled by factor of 0.5; most growth in past N years scaled by factor of 1.2; job postings for it scaled by 1; etc etc; combine them and calculate new scores). I don't know if I'd actually get any more usable value out of that, but it'd be (arguably) better than these stats we've been given lately.
Frankly, the only thing that's going to upend the JS dominance of client-side web programming is a functional language. There isn't a compelling reason to trade OOP horses on the web. There's a good reason to choose a better paradigm for the problem. A functional paradigm with a good immutability story is going to have a much better time convincing people to rethink how they program web apps with a focus on user interaction over time.
There isn't much point in vying for who can do the best at mixing data and behavior. Separating those will be a good way to compel people to consider alternatives.