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

[gmack]

People struggle with pretty much every language, it's just that the bugs are different in each.

Re:As a C programmer

[w1z7ard]

People struggle with pretty much every language, it's just that the bugs are different in each.

Sure, but I would argue some languages are dominating strategies over others. There are bugs which simply don't exist in some languages but do in others. Like null pointers or references do not exist in OCaml (instead, you must use the optional type explicitly).

Re:As a C programmer

[w1z7ard]

C is still the most portable language in the universe. The only real language that works on all phones, in particuarl (ok, C++ does too but C is where you get all the amazing well written, optimized libraries you'd want on most devices).

Re:As a C programmer

[jellomizer]

First this is from the IEEE.

Many Software Developers are not affiliated with the IEEE as they may have followed the Computer Science discipline vs the Computer Engineering discipline.

So for the people IEEE would survey would be Engineers and companies with a Engineering discipline.

Now this Engineering discipline is about a make it once and make it right mentality. Meaning there is a preference towards more lower level coding, allowing detailed and measured controls over each line of code, at the expense of maintainability and programming time. C and Java is good for that type of coding.

However the Computer Science discipline is about making it maintainable, reusable, and fast deployment. This could cause less reliable programs with harder to calculate measures on performance. So languages such as Python and .NET have more appeal.

These different disciplines have cause many of flame war, as each other camp looks at the other guys code and says it is pure crap, because they focused so much on X and not on Y where Y is far more important and needed in real life.

The problem with C isn't that it is a hard language. It is a very simple language. But because it does things at a lower level there is often a lot of extra work (Memory Management and Pointers) that makes it difficult to get up to speed because it requires a lot more attention to detail on how each part works. While these other language you focus more on the problem being solved, even though your solution while solves the problem could be done so much better.

Re:As a C programmer

[phantomfive]

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.

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

[jellomizer]

C in terms of its primitives are portable. However if you are making a Phone App, you are not going to have a lot of luck with making a cross compiled app with a UI that will work well with iOS and Android. Because a lot of the code requires calling libraries and OS particular functions. Sure you can do it with bunch of #ifdef
but it is nearly like writing a program over again for each system. You would be better off with a good source control.

Re:As a C programmer

[goose-incarnated]

C is still the most portable language in the universe. The only real language that works on all phones, in particuarl (ok, C++ does too but C is where you get all the amazing well written, optimized libraries you'd want on most devices).

It's not only the portability that matters, it's the software reuse. You write your nifty image recognition library in Java and that's pretty much the only language that can use it. Same for Python, C++, etc. Do a locate \.so | wc -l on your system - chances are that the libraries *not* written in C are a rounding error. Pick just about anything remotely useful - chances are it'd more more useful if written in C, because at the very least you can open the executable using dlopen/dlsym and invoke main() with the correct arguments.

If you stick to a C-only subset of C++ you can write your library in C++, but at that point why bother with C++ anyway?

Re:As a C programmer

[gweihir]

You are certainly right about that. The nice thing about C is that the really incompetent will not get their code to run at all and weed themselves out that way. In contrast, a bad Java coder (for example) will usually get things to work, but very badly so.

Re:As a C programmer

[goose-incarnated]

Meaning there is a preference towards more lower level coding, allowing detailed and measured controls over each line of code, at the expense of maintainability and programming time.

I sorta agree with the rest, but this statement is dead wrong - if you want it reusable you write it in C. Anything written in Python/.Net/etc is only usable from a miniscule subset of languages, while the libzip.so on your system is reusable from everything. This is why the practical/engineering types write it in C - if they chose Python they'll have to rewrite it should they ever decide to use some other language. When they write it in C it need never be rewritten.

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. 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. The people producing Python or C++ libraries abandon those libraries when they move to a new language - they don't have a choice.

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

[beelsebob]

No, as a pretty experienced C programmer too, it's *really* hard to find people who are even vaguely competent C programmers. You only need to set most people a completely trivial problem with vague exposure to pointers/memory management and they'll trip themselves up. "Implement memmov" usually is enough to catch out 95% of people.

Re: As a C programmer

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. What this article tells me is that
good programmers have always known
that c (and maybe c++) is where
real work gets accomplished,
and those that got addicted to
interpreted crap are starting to
realize they were wasting their
time on hard to solve problems
that they 'discovered' were
actually difficult to solve with
an interpreted language.

Then again, I may be completely
full of crap as I have only
have 40+ years of experience.

Re: As a C programmer

[Anonymous Coward]

And clearly still use a 40 character wide terminal for everything.

Re: As a C programmer

[loufoque]

I see you do not understand what a mobile app is.
There is no real logic in the app, it's just UI for a web service. The UI is target-specific, in particular because it needs to respect platform-specific idioms and UX paradigms, and the UI is 100% of the app.

You're coming from the world of real applications which do real work and for which the UI is just a trivial interface driving a library. This is not what mobile is.

Re:As a C programmer

[thinkwaitfast]

And why would you need to do this?

misra?

Re:As a C programmer

[jellomizer]

You are confusing the language and the OS feature. That libzip.so will need to be recompiled for every OS once compiled it isn't c code it is a compiled library. I could make a library in any other compiled language say FORTRAN.

If distribution your c code and the new system doesn't have the library then you get into dependacy hell.

Now C is considered portable because you can compile it on a different system. But that Python program I make I can run on Linux or Windows without any changes. Just as long as the interpreter is installed.

Re:As a C programmer

[swillden]

If you stick to a C-only subset of C++ you can write your library in C++, but at that point why bother with C++ anyway?

Or you could write your library in C++ but put it behind a C interface. Then you can use all of the expressive power of C++ internally, and provide an API that can be called from any language. And it will still be very close to as portable as if it were written in plain C, because we now have decent C++ compilers on very nearly every platform.

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

[arth1]

Do a locate \.so | wc -l on your system - chances are that the libraries *not* written in C are a rounding error. Pick just about anything remotely useful - chances are it'd more more useful if written in C, because at the very least you can open the executable using dlopen/dlsym and invoke main() with the correct arguments.

Well, personally, I find the fortran written fast fourier tranform (fft) libraries rather useful...
To call from C, even :)

I'm sure there's way to create good C versions too, but the librarary sources might need a lot of macros, and leave a lot more to the mercy of compiler optimizations.

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]

Personally, I like Ruby.

In all seriousness, arguments along the lines of "very few people are competent C programmers" in my experience can be generalized to "very few people are competent <insert any programming language here> programmers". Yes, C is a more challenging language because it requires very strict discipline to do well, but 8+ years in the industry has shown me that good coders are the exception.

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.

Re:As a C programmer

[mysidia]

"Implement memmov"? WTH would you do that? There's a reason that memmov() is a Library call.

It's rough to implement such subroutines accurately; even if you know what you are doing.

You don't need to be capable of doing low-level coding on a whim to be a competent C programmer.

Sounds like you're expecting the average C programmer to be a low-levell 3-Star or 4-Star pointers expert, and your standards may be unreasonably high, there.

Re: As a C programmer

[Dutch Gun]

I'd say that "good programmers" can and do learn a variety of languages, and will use the most appropriate one for the task at hand. There's nothing wrong with getting down to the metal when requirements call for it, but doing so is foolish for many types of projects where top performance isn't a requirement. I'm a game developer, so I live and breathe C++ of course. But I write my tools in C#, and our game's scripting language is in Lua.

Why C# for tools? Because it has reflection, and a fantastic library for all sorts of serialization, networking, and UI support.

Why Lua for game scripts? Because then we can recompile and reload our game scripts on the fly, without even stopping the game.

Which programming language is "best"? It's a stupid question to start with, because the only reasonable answer is "it depends on what you're looking for in a language".

Re:As a C programmer

[beelsebob]

You would need to implement memmove because, believe it or not, there are people out there who implement the libraries that memmove is implemented in. There are also people out there who implement libraries that need to know how to at *very* least do basic pointer operations, and how to work with raw memory.

As I said - it's very hard to find genuinely good C programmers - most ignore how very very simple functions are implemented.

For reference, a naïve (acceptable in an interview) implementation of memmove can be achieved in 4 lines of code. This isn't rocket science I'm asking about.

Re:As a C programmer

[goose-incarnated]

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

You missed the point - if your library is in C, it can be used from just about every language. Your java code is reusable only from Java, or will you now claim that those libraries from over a decade ago are useful to you when you move to another language?

Re: As a C programmer

[murdocj]

Sounds like you don't have the appropriate libraries available. I worked for years in an environment with C and it was extremely productive. Never felt like I was "resolving the same problems" because the first time I solved it, I spent some time thinking about how to make the solution reusable.

Re:As a C programmer

[johnw]

I doubt you can write in 4 lines of C a memmov() function that works correctly, when source and target area are overlapping.

#include <stdlib.h>
void memmov(void *dst, const void *src, size_t count) {
        memmove(dst, src, count);
}

How did I do?

Disclaimer - it's years since I did any serious C programming.

Re: As a C programmer

[RavenLrD20k]

Yeah, he really needs to get up with the times.  80 Character punch cards are wh
ere real programmers get jobs done. Hell, I'd write this post in COBOL but Slash
dot would block it saying that I'm yelling.

Re: As a C programmer

[Coisiche]

Let it slide... let it slide... No, can't

and a free reign

Exercise of sovereign power applies to nations, not offices, nor basements. If you mean that no restrictions apply, then it's "free rein".

5 month too early???

[matthelm007]

I don't think 2016 is over yet, is it? Looks like someones pointer overflowed!

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:No jobs for C

[luis_a_espinal]

I've mainly found only jobs for C. Because I look for Linux kernel and RTOS jobs.

This. I simply call bullshit on the upper-OP claim that nobody hires for C anymore. I mean shit, were I work, we hire for C (and C++ and Java, depending on the product.) People don't realize how much C is around us. Thermometers, thermostats, controllers. Anything with a PIC or AVR processor most likely runs something written in C.

Not to mention, as you said, jobs in kernel and RTOS development.

"syntactic sugar" except for OOP

[mykepredko]

I would agree with you except for the fact that Java, C++, C#, Objective C and even Javascript all have Object Orientated Programming aspects to them which is much more than "syntactic sugar" (which is a great term).

Unfortunately for some, C saddles the user with the dreaded pointer. I'm not sure how pointers are taught today, but "back in the day" when I was taught pointers in university, the approach taken was pretty sadistic with the goal of instructors to demonstrate their intellectual superiority over their students by showing (and testing) the most bizarre and unlikely combinations of * and &. I suspect that this is reason for the fear of C and pointers (when all you really need to know about pointers is how to pass data to and from methods and how pointers can be used with strings).

Re:"syntactic sugar" except for OOP

[HiThere]

It doesn't matter HOW pointers are taught, they are inherently unsafe. Even reference counted pointers are unsafe, and I don't believe that those are currently a part of C. Pointers are a buffer overflow attack (or error) waiting to happen.

Embeded

[Anonymous Coward]

Embedded is getting popular right now, especially with IoT. Based on my experience, C is filling the role of Assembly for a lot of businesses. More importantly, this claim that C is the "top" language isn't very relevant to most developers because they won't be doing embedded work at the rate insinuated by this report.

Cant say i'm surprised

[maliqua]

Given the popularity of arduino and similar embedded devices that favor C I'm not really surprised at all to find C is still incredibly wide spread and popular

Re:C is the best

[HiThere]

C is actually quite portable. But documenting it correctly so that someone else (or you a few years later) can understand what's going on it a beast.

C is more portable than either assembler or C++ (to bracket it with similar languages). It's not the most portable, for that you need either an interpreted language or one that runs on a virtual machine. Like Java, Python, Smalltalk, Ruby, etc., but it's probably the most portable language that compiles to native code.

Object-oriented is a fad

[TheSync]

Object-oriented is a fad!

So is IPv6!

Re:Object-oriented is a fad

[phantomfive]

Object-oriented is a fad!

I wouldn't have believed you 10 years ago, but now OOP is out and uncool. The new hip people all program in functional style (and OOP is messing everything up). I'm waiting for someone to discover the new imperative programming paradigm.

Re:Object-oriented is a fad

[balbeir]

Nah, in 10 years someone will invent the GOTO statement and the Spaghetti Programming paradigm will be the coolest game in town.

Re:C is the best

[subanark]

javascript is a good language since it runs in the most trusted sandbox, your browser.

Re:C is the best

[fahrbot-bot]

C is just a glorified macro assembler. Real programmers use butterflies anyways.

Nice. 'course, there's an Emacs command to do that: C-x M-c M-butterfly

[I actually have that comic taped to my door.]

Not a Surprise

[ewhac]

The "winning" language was going to be Python, but a buffer overflow error caused C to be output at the top of the list.

As a perl developer...

[CaptnCrud]

does this mean I can raise my rates? : p

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?

Re:C is the best

[ChrisMaple]

C will fail to help you make a chip.

I've used and modified C programs that took SPICE output to optimize IC circuit speed, and interfaced with part of Verilog to calculate gate loading and speed. C was essential to our process of chipmaking.