Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by timothy on from the because-of-the-taste dept.

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?

1 of 358 comments (clear)

  1. Ubiquity and Longevity by zapadnik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ubiquity and Longevity are important. It takes a while to create Big software projects, so fad du-jour languages have an Achilles Heel here. Java is pretty much ubiquitous and is very long-lived (so far).

    When you have large code bases and lots of people trained in a technology then you tend to use it even more. WORA (Write Once Run Everywhere) is a killer feature, and Java system written on architectures that are now less used (i386, Irix, AIX, Solaris, etc) work pretty much painlessly on new hardware. Java scales from the massive to the miniature and thanks to the talented people at Sun, Oracle and OpenJDK the performance of Java is pretty phenomenal.

    I personally am writing a jet combat flight simulator (which I'm mostly keeping under the radar, for now) in Java. I never have to worry about multi-threaded CPU performance. Seriously, never. I only spend time worrying about the bottlenecks in the GPU. Java and OpenGL (via JoGL) are a potent combination. I will never go back to C++ if I can help it - Java libraries and tooling (I love IntelliJ IDEA and the JDK's VisualVM) are so much better. Long live Java !