Java Named Top Programming Language of 2015 (dice.com)

Nerval's Lobster writes: What was the most popular programming language of 2015? According to the people behind the TIOBE Index, Java took that coveted spot, winning out over C, Python, PHP, and other languages. "At first sight, it might seem surprising that an old language like Java wins this award," read TIOBE's note accompanying the list. "Especially if you take into consideration that Java won the same award exactly 10 years ago." Yet Java remains essential not only for businesses, it continued, but also consumer-centric markets such as mobile development (i.e., Google Android). That being said, even big languages can tumble. (Dice link) Objective-C tumbled from third place to 18th in the past 12 months, thanks to Apple's decision to replace it with Swift. In 2016, TIOBE expects that "Java, PHP (with the new 7 release), JavaScript and Swift will be the top 10 winners for 2016. Scala might gain a permanent top 20 position, whereas Rust, Clojure, Julia and TypeScript will also move up considerably in the chart." What has been your most-used (or best-loved) programming language of the last 12 months?

Comments

Re:Really???

[bluefoxlucid]

Why would you pick Java?

You did see the part where Google wrote a program that converts Java bytecode to Dalvik bytecode, right? Whenever you update Cyanogen and it starts "Optimizing applications", it's reconverting all the Java to Dalvik.

For a more direct answer?

Calling the Java server 2000 times takes 2687 milliseconds. Calling the C# server 2000 times takes 214 milliseconds. The C# one is still much faster.

Retrieving 2000 instances takes 479 milliseconds. That’s roughly half the time as the C# controller—very fast indeed.

The same code implemented in Java and C# seems to run faster in C#; whereas code running on a Java application server versus a C# application server seems to run faster in Java. Apparently Java Web application servers like Tomcat are more mature than .NET Web application servers; but we're talking about bare runtime environments and just-in-time compilation, which lends itself more to C#, apparently.

The torch has been passed back and forth over the years, with platform-specific results--frequently .NET is faster than Java, while Java beats Mono. Again: Google found Java too slow, so wrote Dalvik to interpret Java; they could have done the same with C#/CLR/Mono. They had no way to know Microsoft would drop Core CLR as MIT--Mono folded some of that in for performance--but they did have the resources to write their own Java JVM because Java is too slow.

In short: your question is ridiculous.

Not a big surprise

[OrangeTide]

If you create an industry around having armies of idiot programmers writing boiler plate code all day long, you're going to win any metric based on quantity.