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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?
this is Dice trying to churn their candidate pot, nothing more.
Slashdot really circling the drain quickly now
Even if it is accurate, it is irrelevant. It in theory would just show what has the most volume, but for the purposes of someone using Dice unhelpful. Why learn C if you're looking for a web job? Why learn javascript if you are doing device drivers?
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.
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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.
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...
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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.
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.
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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 .
agree completely, as long as the solution involves Perl :-)
That is one underrated language...
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.
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.
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).