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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.
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.
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.
Most used piece of furniture in large households is the toilet.
... 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 :-)
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.
I don't know why "Shell" is in only 11th place. It's such a powerful language, it has the whole shebang.
lucm, indeed.
that they are less-often corrected?
If you've noticed that, it means that you often read those articles more than once. That's not how Slashdot is supposed to work.
Here is a tutorial:
1) Have a quick look at the new articles. If you manage to read an entire title, click on it, otherwise scroll.
2) Check if the submitter is Bennett. If it's the case, go back to #1.
3) Read the first 2 lines of the summary, and if those contain hyperlinks, move your mouse over the first one to see if it's a reputable domain (but don't click - the idea is just to see if the story is bullshit). If there are many hyperlinks in the first two lines, especially if there is a series of 1-word hyperlinks, go back to #1. In any event don't read more than 2 lines.
4) If there are 10 comments or less, post a Frist! comment. If there are more than 10 but less than 50 comments, post a comment without reading the existing ones. If there are 50 comments or more, find the first 5 Interesting and try to find a weakness in the comment (that's your best way to a 5 Insightful). Don't worry if you don't know the details of what is in the article (or even in the summary), most people don't read those either, and those who do will provide you with the tldr version at some point if you're terribly wrong.
5) If you are bored, scroll to 2/3 of the page and find the first -1 Flamebait. Odds are that it's one of the most interesting comments in the page.
6) If you are still bored and there's nothing left but yro or "answers your questions" stories on the homepage, pick any article, remove the moderation filters and try to find those long rambling homophobic/racist erotica comments, or why not treat yourself to a full read of one of the posts from Mr Hosts file.
There you go. There's plenty to do on Slashdot besides keeping statistics about how often typos are fixed.
lucm, indeed.
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.