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Python Is On the Rise, While PHP Falls (dice.com)
Nerval's Lobster writes: While this month's lists of the top programming languages uniformly put Java in the top spot, that's not the only detail of interest to developers. Which language has gained the most users over the past five years? And which are tottering on the edge of obsolescence? According to PYPL, which pulls its raw data for analysis from Google Trends, Python has grown the most over the past five years—up 5 percent since roughly 2010. Over the same period, PHP also declined by 5 percent. Since PYPL looks at how often language tutorials are searched on Google, its data is a good indicator of how many developers are (or aren't) learning a language, presumably because they see it as valuable to their careers. Just because PYPL shows PHP losing market-share over the long term doesn't mean that language is in danger of imminent collapse; over the past year or so, the PHP community has concentrated on making the language more pleasant to use, whether by improving features such as package management, or boosting overall performance. Plus, PHP is still used on hundreds of millions of websites, according to data from Netcraft. Indeed, if there's any language on these analysts' lists that risks doom, it's Objective-C, the primary language used for programming iOS and Mac OS X apps, and its growing obsolescence is by design.
We won't want this Dice shit here.
Is there really no one at all willing to buy Slashdot?
Which seems highly questionable. Seems to me the methodology of using google search metrics for language popularity works to gauge popularity of a language with enthusiasts but not of actual commercial projects.
PHP depresses.
Counting the number of times tutorials are accessed tells you how many people are learning (or considering learning) a language, not how many are using it now. All this can do is tell you if people expect to need it in the future, because for the most part, if you're currently programming in a particular language, you shouldn't need to be going over tutorials.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
What about Swift? Considering it's only 2 years old, surely it's grown by the most, percentage-wise. I suspect a company called PYPL has an interest in promoting Python...
Python? Seriously? The language where I can't cut and paste anything without it seriously being broken because... whitespace matters?!
Python is as dumbass does.
I got your Python, right here.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Isn't it kind of a strange metric? It measures people who don't really know the language but want to learn it. But did they learn it in the end? Did they end up using it? Was it actual programmers trying to get into a new language / refreshing one for a new project, or was it complete beginners who heard "python is cool" or something like that and search for a tutorial thinking they will be great programmers?
And not all languages have an equal basis in this metric. For example who would search google for a perl tutorial? I mean it doesn't even support regex for christ sake! Also it is well known that Perl either comes as an Epiphany, or you are taught by Monks, you don't read a tutorial...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Python provides no true concurrency due to global interpreter lock. Java is not suitable for realtime due to unpredictable GC, while C/C++ is not suitable for anything which should never crash or return random results due to memory corruption. None of mainstream languages make automatic use of multiple cores and GPU - explicit provisions must be made by programmer to parallelize part of the program, often with error prone semantics and a separate language like OpenCL.
Yes, those are hard problems, but it's also 2015 and we can come up with powerful compilers and JIT virtual machines. Going back to less concurrency than plain old shell scripts where '&' starts a true separate process is not an answer.
It's all those googling to figure out how to fix their white-space messes
I know it's a matter of taste, but I understand why Python, aside from simply being popular, is used so often. Having spent time using several languages, I can say that brevity bordering on the obscure (often mistaken for elegance) is not something to encourage. Don't get me wrong, it's great if you can reduce the steps used to implement an algorithm (especially if you get big-O benefits as well), but simply reducing line counts isn't anything to brag about. I mean, who cares if you implemented something in a single line of Perl that took 5 lines of Python for me? Eighteen months later, when the code gets dug up for whatever reason, I know which will be far easier to follow and correct if needed.
That, to me, is the real strength of Python: it enforces readability without requiring too many extra characters (Tcl being representative of the other extreme). If using an interpreted language isn't an issue, it almost always seems like the way to go for my tastes.
We will never be the change to the weather and the sea
I repeat, "Whoopdee fucking doo", which means, "Who fucking cares?"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
A real programmer does not care about languages. A real programmer does not attempt to write a kernel in perl. A real programmer does not attempt to write a glue script in C . A real programmer cares more about the optimum solution to the problem than which tools to use .
agree completely, as long as the solution involves Perl :-)
That is one underrated language...
Hello,
Although python is efficient you cant downgrade php, because php is used in all most popular solutions. even today.
Abdul
www.shortreminders.com
Haha. "A real programmer does not care about languages." "A real programmer would not use language x for task y." Perhaps you should think a bit before spouting contradictory inane platitudes.
His statement is true if you consider it to mean that a real programmer does not care about any one language to the exclusion of others.
I was at a Cisco event recently that had a discussion on Application Centric Infrastructure, basically using a master controller to do all kinds of fancy on-demand things to switchports at the access layer depending on factors like authentication of the device or user account. The presenter basically said there are two ways to go about it, the first is to use the somewhat crappy GUI/Web interface, and the second is to write stuff in Python that the controller makes use of. As someone that uses a lot of Bash right now the Python approach is definitely more my style than relying on a web page.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
So, the fact that people who are forced into programming in Java spend more time (out of necessity) googling for tutorials than they do writing code means that Java is the most popular language?
> No real programmer uses these stupid script kiddie languages.
No real programmer makes silly statements like that.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Java, Python, &or php are some of the most common starter languages; once an amateur has a couple of them down, they're better at finding tutorials by going straight to sites that host them - without the intermediary Google search.
Didn't Slashdot just run a post about how WordPress (written in PHP!) powers 25% of the web?
Why, yes. Yes, they did.
Please stop the hyperbolic clickbait.
Busted. We're writers, not developers, so we wrote our XML processing toolchain with XSLT, Bash, Perl, Ruby, Python, and PHP. We only re-publish about 30,000 pages of documentation in about 20 different end-user formats every single day, so it's not like it's a *real* application or anything...
*eyeroll*
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You forgot to s/BSD/PHP/g, loser.
Perl. Perl all the way through, and nothing but Perl. Apparently after they canned the guy who took credit for writing it, they didn't feel it was worth while to put any additional money into the code, ever again (and it seems that attitude has continued through subsequent acquisitions).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
PHP is my language of choice. Yes the language has issues, but it's almost always able to get the job done in the least amount of time - plus it works in so many different environments.
It makes coding fun, especially for prototyping and playing around. Not to mention I code circles around the Java and C# guys at work.
(Otherwise, I'm all about C)
Come get your white space.
No one uses PERL for real application, get over it. It was a tool available to scratch an itch many years ago. Developers using it are not real devs, they're admins moving into a new field lacking all the discipline real programmers learnt through language study and actually being paid to cut code. If these PERL zealots cannot open their eyes to better suited languages, the farther away from real system design and coding they are, the better.
As a professional brogrammer, I disrespectfully disagree.
You are right but you forgot one group using perl - developers stuck supporting shitty-ass perl code in legacy environments. Some large engineering companies are so fucking entrenched in perl it's pathetic.
Because of the duck typing maintaining, extending and refactoring any non-trivial Python project is a fubar. Make a typo in the variable name and catch this bug 2 months later in the production deployment. Thank you very much, but no unit tests from the whole world will cover this.
Because of the GIL it doesn't scale across the modern hardware so it forces programmer into process-level parallelism and 3rd-party http server with wsgi crap which gives deployment and maintenance headaches.
Because of the interpreting nature it is too slow to be considered as good choice for any CPU-intensive tasks (not only math but anything outside of I/O and networking).
I must admit though that it is great for scripting. So there should it stay forever and personally I'd run away from any job description which includes Python as a primary language.
Verbose notions of readability are misguided. Every time someone discourages brevity and says that something takes 5 times as much code but is more "readable", I wonder how they haven't noticed the unnecessary time and mental energy they are wasting.
The only way to get 5 times the LOC is to have more state to track across those lines. You could argue that a single line 5x as long due to having mnemonic names is clearer than one with just a,b,c or whatever, but 5 lines vs 1 line means you have 4 statements through which you have to track the names and meanings of symbols before you can understand the ultimate line. That is not more readability, that is overhead. That is taking up space in your short term memory (which has real, physical limitations).
Actually, they do. You do not qualify as "real programmer" though, big ego and small skills is not the qualification needed.
For example, Python is very nice as glue and configuration language for c-modules that do the heavy lifting. I have been using that successfully in some pretty advanced projects.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Replying to undo accidental "Offtopic" moderation.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
If you are walking down the street and accidentally kick a stone, you will find that underneath that stone there was a guy programming in php... They are everywhere these days.
In other words, a real programmer *does* care about languages, only does it wisely.
Index is created by analyzing how often language tutorials are searched on Google
And how should this be related to rise and fall of a programming language popularity?
I would instead say that it shows how hard a programming language is to be learnt or mastered.
This study is completely flawed and aimed to religion wars among programmers!
Every one actually knows that C is the king of all languages, you insensitive statistical clod!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
While I agree with you, I'm recently having to support a complete application written in PHP. And at every turn I'm getting more and more surprised about how PHP is a shitty language for the task.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I know my comment shows up a bit late but I just started re-learning Perl5.
I have a well valued history in programming different languages. Assembler, C, Java and Scripting. The past years I did a lot in Bash to save a lot of repeated command line hacking when I needed to enter always the same stuff.
A few of my projects reached a nice amount of wrokflow (and size: 25k bash). And thus I decided to have a few changes here. In the 90's I was told that Perl replaces Bash, AWK, SED, Grep and co. and thus the people who told me where right.
I sat down and made some thoughts which way to go. Perl and Python came into my mind. Sure Python seem to have some adantages as well because it seem to be more mainstream. But at the end I settled with Perl because Perl is what I wanted.
If you compare the scripting features then it's this Bash for basic stuff, Perl and Python for more advaned followed by all the modern (or more complex) Languages like C or Java.
After reading the book "Beginning Perl" from Curtis Poe, I started to realize that the language has indeed a "different" syntax. Datatypes are dealt differently. Scalars, Hashs and Arrays etc.. I came to the point where I tought if the code is portable to something else one day. E.g. if I switch from Bash to Perl to e.g. Java.
But then. It's always up to the programmer to write clean code.
The reason why I didn't went the Python way... Because everyone is jumping on it... It makes one become one of many people...
In the UK at least Python is being taught in secondary schools (ages 11 to 16) this could account for a lot of tutorial searches.
How about you fix the terrible PHP parser so it isn't TRIVIAL to write unsecure code?
Don't give me your bullshit about how it is easy to avoid that problem, you are not the reason this is a problem, the other 70% of the users that use PHP are the problem. The amateurs that google some morons stackoverflow post, or some shit blog post on a REALLY NEATO piece of code that leaves their website open for attack with automated tools.
Literally no other language has the problems PHP does at the level it does. PHP is KING of being broken by design. FIX IT.
For all the things PHP to be "dying" to, it had to be Python.
For a start, those people are probably trying to figure out why the hell their code isn't working because they thought whitespace was a GRRREAT way to enclose code in distinct groups, be it functions or whatever.
What kind of bullshit you are writing.
You can write maintainable and well formated Perl programs if you want to. It all depends on the programmer. So crappy formatted programms are only a matter of a pebkac problem and not the problem of the programming language.
If you had some cluse then you would know that you can write object oriented code with Perl. You either use Perl's internal object orientation model and class out all modules in sub packages with a nice packaging convention: e.g. package My::Cool::Package;
You can also go more advanced and use Moose if you wish.
I also recommend reading "Modern Perl" by chromatic (google for it).
> A real programmer does not care about languages.
A real programmer certainly _does_ care. The available modules, version dependencies, and API's can vary tremendously. Even simple features like "regexp" have subtly different syntax with different tools, string parsing and processing functions differ fundamentally in the handling of "end-of-line" characters, and even whether a "true" value is "0" or a positive number can differ profoundly and affect binary logic.
To say "a real programmer does not care" is similar to saying that a real musician does not care what instrument they play.
I believe the poster meant to say "...does not care about languages subjectively." as in "tools in a toolbox - pick the right one for the job."
Of course, that statement always has to be bounded by the skillset of the engineers involved (e.g. picking C for a *nix systems application/daemon is a clear choice unless no one on your team knows C.)
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A real programmer does not care about languages. A real programmer does not attempt to write a kernel in perl. A real programmer does not attempt to write a glue script in C . A real programmer cares more about the optimum solution to the problem than which tools to use .
Your first sentence contradicts the rest of your statement where you very clearly show that a 'REAL' programmer most certainly does care about the language, which is why he isn't writing glue script in C or a kernel in Perl.
And 'REAL' programmers most certainly do avoid shitty languages, of which PHP is one as is Perl (sorry if you still think leaning toothpicks and a language where everyone writes the same one line operation in a different way is a good thing, but that just makes you stupid ;)
So you go ahead and pretend to be all high and mighty and 'a real programmer' ... and us old guys will laugh at you.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Pffft... Luxury. We write code in a shoebox.
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I think you all have a serious twist in your fucking panties. Jesus, you sound like children.
Seems really objective. And they're using Google search results as a metric. We all know Google is a Python/Java shop. Java at #1, followed by Python "on the rise". No surprise here.
Nice to see the "real programmers don't use [insert language here]" troll still has some life in it.
Must be pushing at least 40 by now, and still pulling in the responses.
The object oriented system of perl 5 can not keep data hidden. There is autovivification, and other crazy stuff possible with perl 5.... Knowing the entire language requires lots of constant work to keep it in memory.
"No one uses PERL for real application,"
You are right, you'd be an idiot to code something like booking.com or slashdot.com in perl...
oh wait.
Python and PHP have two completely different use cases. They're not related at all. Your implication is absurd.
You ain't Mel.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
This is the problem with PHP. PHP used to stand for Personal Home Page. That's exactly the level of programming it was originally designed to do. Making simple pages for personal use, maintained by yourself.
Since then, it has grown, but many of the things that make it great for small personal home pages make it quite unweildly for larger projects.
Personally, I don't like PHP or Python. PHP is just terrible for reasons I won't get into here. The only thing that really bothers me about Python is that it uses white space to infer where code blocks begin and end. It's not that I think you shouldn't have properly indented code. The problem is that the blocks should be defined by something other than white space so that your tool can automatically put in the correct white space.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It doesn't really use "white space", it just uses "levels of indentation". You can use a single space as the "tab width" and it becomes perfectly clear where each block begins and ends. The same style used to be somewhat more common in C as well, although I haven't seen it in a while (and C didn't require it, of course). Using spaces is not much stranger than using curly brackets, though, and as someone who has misplaced a curly brace more times than I care to recall I much prefer the simplicity of merely shifting blocks left or right to indicate scope. That is essentially the programmer's job, in the first place, not that of the editor/compiler.
I'll have you know that I do not have "fucking panties." In fact, I take my panties off when I'm fucking.
You can always use Django to get the best of both worlds ;)
I knew this was going to happen the moment that teenage chic on the episode of Blindspt last week started dissing the FBI chic over using PHP.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
http://www.bluecieloecm.com/bluecielo-project-portal-kronodoc is real application done with PERL.
what about Fortran? Should I learn Fortran?
A 'real' programmer, in vast majority of cases, doesn't code in a dozen languages during work hours. We all specialize and as such are pigeonholed dealing with certain problems.
you can't just take a stock ticker and make it your website's name. PYPL?
It seems to me that an increase in the people attempting to learn Perl could be just a side effect of them trying to learn another technology. Take Hadoop into consideration, if I'm a developer attempting to learn Hadoop I can learn Java or Purl to complete the same body of work in Hadoop. There are also parts of Hadoop that uses functional programming which wasn't supported in earlier versions of Java so they needed to look at Purl to support that aspect of the architecture.
Why wouldn't you just write it in PHP? [duck]
Real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.
As someone who likes Perl a lot, I agree.
Perl is great for quick-and-dirty scripts by systems admins like myself. It is my goto language when Bash just won't do it.
That's more than sufficient reason to keep it around. Just because it's there doesn't mean you have to use it for large applications.
Java has been doing realtime for over a decade now. In fact the very first JSR was JSR 1: Real-time Specification for Java which began in 1998.
Saying Java is not suitable for realtime due to "unpredictable GC" shows you haven't read much on the topic. Many Java open-source projects guarantee millions of operations per second on the right hardware. Java has a huge HFT community footprint.
Take a look at what http://chronicle.software/ and OpenHFT is doing for instance.
No one uses PERL for real application...
You are so right. No one uses PERL for anything. PERL doesn't exist. It's "Perl" or "perl". Idiot.
Slashdot was written in Perl?
That explains a lot.
def printme( str ):#{
"This prints a passed string into this function"
print str
return
#}
You want your precious damn curly braces? Is that really so fucking goddamned hard?
A programmer cares only about the algorithm's they have learned or created on their own that can be implemented in any computer language.
Actually they do. .EXE and unable to do maintenance on the code. So a minor tweak requires a full rebuild.
These modern interpreted languages offer many key benefits over the compiled languages such as C/C++, <whatever>.NET, Java.
1. No compiled code: Sucks if you are trying to offer a closed source solution. But often in a business environment having your source as your running code, means decades after you leave you will still have the source available, even after they lost the original project. How many pros had came to a work environment where there was at least one legacy (Usually VB) application that all you have is an
2. Platform independence. Sure Java is good too. But having code written that work well on various OS's and versions means you can keep this code longer than people decide to change the environment
3. Full language library. These languages were designed to get work done and quick coding. That means there they come with a rich library of common use tasks which are optimised for performance. While in theory you can get faster in C/C++ however when deadlines are looming, you may do a sub optimal get it done code, because a standard sub class isn't available.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Disagree. Real programmers care a lot about what languages they use.
No, with butterflies...
Obligatory XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/378/
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Some languages are better than others for certain tasks, and some languages, like PHP, are crap. While there are things that PHP will do better than C++, there's basically nothing that PHP will do better than Python.
Likewise, I can think of no case for staring a new project in COBOL.
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Perl can and is used in real world applications.
Perl is not staying put. It's it inconstant development and multiple web frameworks keeping up with the latest models in use today. And these frameworks are independent of mod_perl as well.
Real programmers write their own languages! Only newbs use someone else's language.
I put your panties on when I'm fucking.
You forgot to check your fail.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
> And at every turn I'm getting more and more surprised about how PHP is a shitty language for the task.
I'd rather work with just about any PHP framework/CMS than with the steaming pile of .NET dung that is Sitecore!
> No real programmer uses these stupid script kiddie languages.
Okay, then by all means point us to something you've built. Tell us what language you used and what makes it great.
Bonus points if anyone has ever heard of or used your software/site.