C Top Programming Language For 2016, Finds IEEE's Study (ieee.org)

IEEE Spectrum, a highly regarded magazine edited by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, has released its annual programming languages list, sharing with the world how several languages fared against each other. To assess the languages the publication says it worked with a data journalist and looked into 10 online sources -- including social chatter, open-source code production, and job postings. The publication has rated C as the top programming language this year, followed by Java, Python, C++, and R. From their article:After two years in second place, C has finally edged out Java for the top spot. Staying in the top five, Python has swapped places with C++ to take the No. 3 position, and C# has fallen out of the top five to be replaced with R. R is following its momentum from previous years, as part of a positive trend in general for modern big-data languages that Diakopoulos analyses in more detail here. Google and Apple are also making their presence felt, with Google's Go just beating out Apple's Swift for inclusion in the Top Ten. Still, Swift's rise is impressive, as it's jumped five positions to 11th place since last year, when it first entered the rankings. Several other languages also debuted last year, a marked difference from this year, with no new languages entering the rankings.The publication has explained in detail the different metrics it uses to evaluate a language.

Comments

As a C programmer

[OrangeTide]

I find the results shocking. As most people I deal with struggle to write moderately complex C programs.

Also the use of the word "best" is highly subjective.

Re:As a C programmer

[al0ha]

Nowhere in TFA does it say best - is says Most Popular, and that is not subjective.

Re:As a C programmer

[OrangeTide]

The title of the post was "C Best Programming Language For 2016, Finds IEEE's Study", but it has been edited to "C Top Programming Language For 2016, Finds IEEE's Study"

such is life getting first post.

Re:As a C programmer

[phantomfive]

software engineering/programming people is that they don't care about reusability, and it shows; once the project is done they move on to the next one. The people producing C libraries (like myself) are happily reusing the libraries we wrote two decades ago without having to rewrite them to use in another language.

That's quite a statement! And maybe true....

Re:As a C programmer

[Xyrus]

The problem with the software engineering/programming people is that they don't care about reusability, and it shows; once the project is done they move on to the next one.

That's a bullshit statement and you know it. The people who maintain projects like Spring, Hadoop, etc. don't give a shit about re-usability? Yeah, ok.

The people producing C libraries (like myself) are happily reusing the libraries we wrote two decades ago without having to rewrite them to use in another language.

And I still happily reuse Java libraries I wrote from over a decade ago without having to worry about what particular machine they're going to be run on, what OS changes have been made, etc. I haven't been doing much python programming lately, but I'm pretty sure I can run the same scripts I wrote 10 years ago and still have them work just fine today.

In addition, there is absolutely nothing special about C. C is a language, nothing more. The compiler can produce binary lib files that can be linked in to other code, but that isn't limited in any way to just C.

Use the appropriate tool for the job, and avoid treating everything like nail just because you only know how to use a hammer.

Re:As a C programmer

[Curate]

Firstly, you can't safely cast pointers to unsigned long. Unsigned long isn't guaranteed to be big enough to hold a pointer value. Secondly, (dst - src >= len) is not even close to the correct condition for testing that the buffers overlap. Thirdly, the reason for not using a backward copy in all cases is that it corrupts the output buffer in 1 of the 2 overlapping cases. Those three huge errors aside, you make some good points.

Re:As a C programmer

[warm_warmer]

Also worth mentioning that not only does C run on the most different processors, C is the most portable between languages.....that is, if you write a library in C, it can be used in basically every other language.

There can actually be surprising gotchas regarding portability. Good examples:

• - dereferencing pointers to multi-byte values can cause errors on some processors when the pointer address isn't word-aligned, but will work just fine on others
• - you can't make any assumptions around native word sizes without risking portability issues. This means being very explicit with your types (including <stdint.h> and being super careful about explicitly casting while bit shifting
• - ... you get the point

That's definitely not to say that you *can't* write portable code, just that C libraries may not be as plug-and-play as you'd like, often in surprising and dangerous ways.

No jobs for C

[Shompol]

I spent some time looking for a position that required C a while back. Nobody hires for C anymore. Even shops that actually use C are too ashamed to admit it and advertise their positions as C++. So, looking at TFA:

We measured the demand for different programming languages on the CareerBuilder job site....Because some of the languages we track could be ambiguous in plain text—such as D, Go, J, Processing, and R—we use strict matching of the form “X programming” for these languages.

So off to CareerBuilder and i typed in "C programming", with quotes. Result: electrical engineering positions, other non-developer positions and false-positives. Conclusion: C is used but seldom by developers.

Re:Country? [Re:As a C programmer]

[Tablizer]

No. Let me try to rephrase it.

The increase and/or popularity of C may be a result of embedded programmers working for manufacturing companies, who are mostly NOT in the USA or Europe. (At least manufacturing is not growing in here.)

Thus, if you live in the USA or Europe, you probably should NOT take these numbers (popularity) as a sign that C is a good employment opportunity. The growth is not where you live.

Being Slashdot content is written in English, I assumed mostly USA or UK readers. Perhaps I should have stated that. At least that's who my target audience for the location warning.

Clear now?