C Programming Language Hits a 15-Year Low On The TIOBE Index (businessinsider.com)

Gamoid writes: The venerable C programming language hit a 15-year low on the TIOBE Index, perhaps because more mobile- and web-friendly languages like Swift and Go are starting to eat its lunch. "The C programming language has a score of 11.303%, which is its lowest score ever since we started the TIOBE index back in 2001," writes Paul Jansen, manager of TIOBE Index. With that said, C is still the second most popular programming language in the world, behind only Java. Also worth noting as mentioned by Matt Weinberger via Business Insider, "C doesn't currently have a major corporate sponsor; Oracle makes a lot of money from Java; Apple pushes both Swift and Objective-C for building iPhone apps. But no big tech company is getting on stage and pushing C as the future of development. So C's problems could be marketing as much as anything."

Comments

Rust will replace them all

[Anonymous Coward]

Rust will be the new language everyone uses in 2020.

Re:Rust will replace them all

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah.. It'll be jython servlets running inside a lua hypervisor that is written in javascript.

It's not a popularity contest

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't need a corporate sponsor or a sexy advertising campaign to figure out that if I want something to run on most Linux distributions, as well as the BSDs with minor modifications, C is the obvious choice. Most of the languages being heavily promoted are garbage, that's why companies have to spend money to get anyone to use them. Robust languages don't need a marketing team.

Re:It's not a popularity contest

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the languages being heavily promoted will be dead 10 years from now. Anything serious and written to stand the test of time is done in C. Everything else is transient.

Re:It's not a popularity contest

[demonlapin]

FORTRAN, COBOL, and Lisp are older than C, and all still around. I'm not a programmer, so take what potshots you will. But they are still there...

Re:It's not a popularity contest

[Dutch Gun]

if I want something to run on most Linux distributions, as well as the BSDs with minor modifications, C is the obvious choice

Well, C++ could make that same claim, as well as many other languages. In fact, some are arguably much *better* at cross-platform functionality.

I think where C shines is that it's sort of a "common denominator" language. Just about every language (C++ included) can make use of a C library, or with minimal effort can create hooks into it, like with C#, Objective-C, Lua, or dozens of other languages that rely on low-level code for lots of their functionality. It's also a reasonably simple language, rather easy to wrap your head around (if written well), and is straightforward to learn, with power enough to get close to the metal when needed. So, if you write some code in C, just about anyone else can use it, even if they have to write a bit of "glue" first.

That makes it a hell of a pragmatic choice for many projects, even considering C's more problematic aspects.

Re:It's not a popularity contest

[Dog-Cow]

New code is written in Fortran all the time. I guess you don't work in any place doing numerical analysis more complex than Excel. Talk to a Ford engineer some time. I am sure you'd find the same any large auto manufacturer.

problems, lol

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFS, "c's problems": c doesn't have "problems"; programmers who don't use c have problems. Such as their code is slow, overweight, wasteful of resources, and uses only a fraction of the potential available at the low level.

But you keep holding that warm, safe hand. Momma will lead you right to the rubber room. :)

Or, you know. You could actually learn how to write good code at the most powerful level. That's a radical thought.

Re:problems, lol

[Pseudonym]

c doesn't have "problems"

Sure it does. As TFS notes, C doesn't have a corporate sponsor. That's why (to pick one example) there is no native compliant C compiler for Windows.

(Yes, you can build Clang if you want to. You know what I meant.)

Re:problems, lol

[ShanghaiBill]

From TFS, "c's problems": c doesn't have "problems"; programmers who don't use c have problems.

That is actually what TIOBE measures. It counts Google searches. C programmers are smart enough that they don't need to search for answers on Google, or they use a better website, such as Stackoverflow. A high TIOBE index can mean a language is popular, or it can mean that language has dumb programmers.

Re:problems, lol

[ShanghaiBill]

C doesn't have a corporate sponsor.

Why is that a bad thing? Is Java better because Oracle owns it?

Re:problems, lol

[roca]

The reality is that programmers make lots of mistakes, no matter how smart they are, how educated they are, or how hard they try.

Another reality is that even if the really brilliant programmers never made mistakes, there aren't enough of them to create all the software that the world needs.

Fortunately, in the 44 years since C was created, we've learned how to design languages that are easier to use and prevent or detect many of the worst kinds of mistakes. Recently we've even learned how to do that without giving up the power C programmers need.

Re: problems, lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course Windows has more than one native compliant C compiler. Microsoft doesn't make one but why should anyone care?

Re:problems, lol

[Anonymous Coward]

If your request takes 50ms to process, you're screwed. That's the PYTHON and Perl world that some people live in.

I spent lots of time working on software where 50 us (1/1000th of 50 ms) was considered too long. Think trading protocols. Even real time audio needs to have full processing in less than 20 ms to prevent lip flap. Gaming has similar requirements (FPS gaming, RTS is admittedly a bit more tolerate of latency.)

50 msec is a scalability concern. If it takes you 50 msec to service a request, that means you can only service a maximum of 20 requests per second! (Maybe you can parallelize per core -- but do you want to burn an entire core to get to just 200 ops/sec? Modern transaction systems can process 1 *million* or more transactions per second. Guess what... those are *NOT* written in Python.

Another example -- the entire reason that SSDs are so hot (well almost the entire reason) is that hard disk seek times are too damned slow at about 4ms. (In other words, hard disks peak at around 250 random ops / sec *max theroetical*.) That is *SLOW*. We need to build systems that are faster, that can process data in microseconds, or even hundreds of nanoseconds. (This is what SSDs do.) And the painful seek times of HDDs are still about an order of magnitude faster than the time that you propose is "good enough".

Guess what -- all those systems -- whether your hard disk firmware (or SSD firmware), your device drivers, your kernel, or your filesystem, are all written in a "low level language" (usually C, sometimes, to great misfortune, C++) -- using *SOFTWARE*. Nobody writes that stuff in Python. They'd be fired if they tried!

Tools like Python and Node exist to serve a need to support programmer efficiency over all other considerations. Typically this is for administrative operations where the parallelism is very low, and the performance requirements are almost non-existent. (Is it any wonder that the admin interfaces for the vast majority of products are all steaming piles of crap?)

Python is great for building stuff quickly, and for facilitating "development" by people coming from an IT administration background. Its far less great at building production worthy products -- those ease of use futures like monkey patching, dynamic typing, and an untyped, interpreted language, ultimately cause serious problems for large scale projects. (I've built products in Python. Sadly, I'm pretty sure I have shipped code with Python syntax errors in error handling paths. My C or Go might have been buggy, but at least it friggin' compiled!)

You kids and your fancy damned languages have no idea how the stuff you depend on is really built. But you keep going writing this crappy web sites in NodeJS and Python. Eventually maybe Moore's Law will make your stuff seem to suck a little less. In the meantime, go back to your playgrounds, and let the rest of us get back to building the systems that the rest of the world relies upon.

Re:problems, lol

[CrashNBrn]

No. We use our books by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson.

Re:problems, lol

[Xest]

TIOBEs index is fundamentally flawed, I've posted here analysing why on numerous occasions and in great detail, and whilst my posts on the topic have always been modded to +5 Slashdot still regularly posts drivel based upon it, and people still seem to debate those stories even though they have exactly no merit whatsoever due to the fact the data behind the story is fundamentally broken.

I still have literally no idea why Slashdot posts stories based on TIOBE, and why anyone bothers to debate those stories as if the premise they're dragging from the index has any merit whatsoever. I can only assume TIOBE pays Slashdot for Slashvertisments at this point.

I'll give TIOBE credit, it has in the last year or so updated it's methodology to be slightly less than worthless rather than just completely worthless, but it's still ultimately just a shade of worthless in it's methodology. It looks like they're now using someone who passed high school statistics, rather than someone that failed it. They really need at absolute minimum a statistics graduate though if their index is to be of any value.

I've long said that if they want to drastically increase the value and worth of their index, then rather than counting how many results they get for "C Language" on YouTube, Amazon, Baidu, and Wikipedia which tells us pretty much nothing about it's usage, that they at least switch to using results from Jobsites, and open source project sites. That way they can start to measure what's actually being used, rather than what a bunch of unrelated search engines are confusing their search for.

Consider this, C++ is a (relatively) old language, but one that has been updated, by searching Amazon for "C++ Language" you may therefore get more books on it than any other language, but that tells us absolutely nothing about how much it's being used, as many people who read the early books may have long retired and the books may be entirely irrelevant now, but Amazon still lists them whilst newer C++ developers are buying the newer books it's possible that usage has stayed relatively static for example - the increase in books does not necessarily correlate to an increase in developers. The same problem rings true in other ways for all their other search results.

By using job sites it may still not tell us anything about retirement, but it does at least tell us the trend. Using open source repositorites can be a good indicator of actual usage, though it misses out the entirety of the corporate closed source world which may or may not use a completely different set of technologies.

So whilst TIOBE currently tells us nothing of value, it could be changed to tell us what companies are hiring for and hence using or intending to use, which is helpful, or it could tell us what open source projects are using, which is useful information as it gives you an idea of what open source developers are choosnig to use even if it's not necessarily representative of the whole market.

Short version: TIOBE needs to change it's methology to be meaningful, or Slashdot needs to stop posting stories based on it that are almost certanily incorrect, or at least aren't verifiable by anything from TIOBE.

Re:problems, lol

[Pseudonym]

Flawed logic. C++ doesn't have a corporate sponsor either, and yet it has a native compiler on Windows.

Multiple vendors pay good money to develop compliant C++ compilers for many of the platforms that we use.

The two main challenges I see for C are the competition with C++ and faster hardware.

Most "C compilers" are actually C++ compilers running in a "C mode". The trouble is that most of the corporate sponsors care more about being compliant with the latest C++ standard than being compliant with the latest C standard.

And because C++ is slightly more typesafe (strict aliasing), those optimizers can do more for C++ code than for C. So despite the more complex language, C++ can be marginally faster (~1%).

Probably not even that. In the tiny number of cases where strict aliasing buys you anything at all (which on modern out-of-order hardware it almost never does), it's around the same order of magnitude as the performance that you lose in C++ due to maintaining exception handling information. There's really nothing between C and C++ given the same code these days. In practice, most of the performance gains in C++ come from metaprogramming.

Which gets us to the faster hardware: how often is that performance even needed?

For the vast majority of "embedded" devices that I own, the main performance impact isn't CPU speed, it's battery life. A program which gets its job done as quickly as possible and then puts the CPU into an idle state is far more desirable than one which is perceptually just as responsive but wears down the battery faster.

Re: problems, lol

[loufoque]

Smart people choose their employer based on the project they'd be assigned and the technology they'd work with.

Re:problems, lol

[serviscope_minor]

Probably not even that. In the tiny number of cases where strict aliasing buys you anything at all (which on modern out-of-order hardware it almost never does), it's around the same order of magnitude as the performance that you lose in C++ due to maintaining exception handling information. There's really nothing between C and C++ given the same code these days. In practice, most of the performance gains in C++ come from metaprogramming.

Actually...

Aliasing information does help. Modern compilers do auto parallelization at both the fine level (SIMD) and the coarser thread level in some cases. Take, for example the following code:

void foo(A* a, B* b)
{
        for(i=0;i

A and B are the same types, there is nothing that stops the base where a=b+1. If A and B are different types, strict aliasing tells us those arrays never overlap, and so the compiler can use wide SIMD instructions in that loop.

If A and B are the same type, in C (and in practice C++ compilers with a nonstandard extension), you can specify "restrict", which informs the compilers that the arrays don't alias and so it can use the wide SIMD instructions. In that case C is a bit better than standard C++, since C++ has no restrict keyword.

Also, when it comes to exceptions, these days it's basically zero cost (I think it is actually zero cost), provided you don't throw. The compilers make throwing expensive to do that. I believe there's some sort of big look up table plus bisection somewhere so it can figure out the throw-position from the program counter, which is quite expensive. Then it jumps from there to the correct bit of unwind code. The practical effect is that there's nothing exception related in the main code except for a throw.

Re:problems, lol

[jandersen]

C doesn't have a corporate sponsor.

Why is that a bad thing? Is Java better because Oracle owns it?

It probably isn't, come to that. C has many obvious advantages - it is easy to learn, it is low-level, so programs tend to be fast, the system calls of most OSes are directly accessible from C. The downside is that because it is so easy to learn, it also invites the inexperienced programmer to commit dangerous errors, that can sometimes be hard to pin down. Many of the better class of new languages try to address these problems, although I am not convinced that the solutions are always worth the cost. The best, new feature, in my view, is the introduction of exception handling in Java, C++, Python and other languages.

It is hard to compare C to Java, I think; although they are syntactically similar, they address different classes of problems. Where C is a free-styling sort of "assembler++" (I mean that in a good way), Java has moved to the other end of the spectrum: the compiled byte-code run in a VM on any platform for which a JVM has been implemented, and Java probably has more industrial standards associated with it than any other language; this makes it rather hard to learn to work with, but it also means that there is well-designed, standard way of doing almost every important thing you might want to do with software, and it makes it much likely that your programs are going to be compatible with other Java programs.

Re:problems, lol

[TheRaven64]

The real problem with C is that WG14 sat on its fingers between 1999 and 2011. C11 gave us:

_Generic - Useful for a few things (mostly tgmath.h, which I've rarely seen used in real code because C's type promotion rules make it very dangerous, but it was quite embarrassing that, for 12 years, the C standard mandated a header that could not be implemented in standard C). Existing compilers have all provided a mechanism for doing the same thing (they had to, or they couldn't implement tgmath.h), but it was rarely used in real code. Oh, and the lack of type promotion in _Generic makes it annoyingly verbose: int won't be silently cast to const int, for example, so if you want to handle both then you need to provide int and const int cases, even though it's always safe to use const int where an int is given as the argument.

_Static_assert - useful, but most people had already implemented a similar macro along the lines of:

#define _Static_assert(x) static int _assert_failed_ ## __COUNTER__ [x ? 1 : -1];

This gives a 1 or -1 element array, depending on whether x is true. If x is true, the array is optimised away, if x is false then you get a compile-time failure. _Static_assert in the compiler gives better error diagnostic, but doesn't actually increase the power of the language.

And then we get on to the big contributions: threads and atomics. The threading APIs were bogged down in politics. Microsoft wanted a thin wrapper over what win32 provided, everyone else a thin wrapper over what pthreads provided. Instead, we got an API based on a small company that no one had ever heard of's library, which contains a clusterfuck of bad design. For example, the timeouts assume that the real-time clock is monotonic. Other threading libraries fixed this in the '90s and provide timeouts expressed relative to a monotonic clock.

The atomics were lifted from a draft version of the C++11 spec (and, amusingly, meant that C11 had to issue errata for things that were fixed in the final version of C++11). They were also not very well thought through. For example, it's completely permitted in C11 to write _Atomic(struct foo) x, for any size of struct foo, but the performance characteristics will be wildly different depending on that size. It's also possible to write _Atomic(double) x, and any operation on x must save and restore the floating point environment (something that no compiler actually does, because hardly anyone fully implements the Fortran-envy parts of even C99).

In contrast, let's look at what WG21 gave us in the same time:

Lambdas. C with the blocks extension (from Apple, supported by clang on all platforms that clang supports now) actually gives us more powerful closures, and even that part of blocks that doesn't require a runtime library (purely downward funargs) would have been a useful addition to C. Closures are really just a little bit of syntactic sugar on a struct with a function pointer as a field, if you ignore the memory management issues (which C++ did, requiring you to use smart pointers if you want them to persist longer than the function in which they're created). C++14 made them even nicer, by allowing auto as a parameter type, so you can use a generic lambda called from within the function to replace small copied and pasted fragments.

Atomics, which were provided by the library and not the language in C++11. Efficient implementations use compiler builtins, but it's entirely possible to implement them with inline assembly (or out-of-line assembly) and they can be implemented entirely in terms of a one-bit lock primitive if required for microcontroller applications, all within the library. They scale down to small targets a lot better than the C versions (which require invasive changes to the compiler if you want to do anything different to conventional implementations).

Threads: Unlike the C11 mess, C++11 threads provide useful high-level abstractions. Threads that can be started fro

Re:problems, lol

[Feral Nerd]

C doesn't have a corporate sponsor.

Why is that a bad thing? Is Java better because Oracle owns it?

It probably isn't, come to that. C has many obvious advantages - it is easy to learn, it is low-level, so programs tend to be fast, the system calls of most OSes are directly accessible from C. The downside is that because it is so easy to learn, it also invites the inexperienced programmer to commit dangerous errors, that can sometimes be hard to pin down. Many of the better class of new languages try to address these problems, although I am not convinced that the solutions are always worth the cost. The best, new feature, in my view, is the introduction of exception handling in Java, C++, Python and other languages.

Exceptions or something like them would be nice to have in C (I'm sure that's not possible for some extremely good technical reason but a guy can dream). However, the thing about C that annoys me the most is the fact that I have two re-invent the wheel all the time, that, introduce libraries to the project or write my own utility libraries. The thing I think C is missing the most is a major extension of it's standard library. C++ for example is full of utility libraries with functions to do small mundane tasks like check strings. Things that can be finished off by one call to a utility function that is part of the standard library in C++ can only be solved in C by either writing several lines of code or including an external dependency that may or may not compile when you move to some other platform and even if it does the behaviour may not be the same. Headaches with different Lex/Yacc implementations spring to mind and even with the same Lex/Yacc implementation behaving differently on, say Linux and AIX or Solaris, the list of headaches connected to external dependencies is long. Also there is a lot of things that can be solved in a single assignment in C++ that can only be done in a much more clunky way in C.

Re:problems, lol

[AmiMoJo]

C is a very compact language, you can learn and remember all of it without a reference guide. Hence there is less need to google stuff.

Re:problems, lol

[jrbrtsn]

Exceptions are possible in C. See the documentation for setjmp() and longjmp().

That said, exceptions are just "kicking the can down the road" for error handling. If a function call can fail, then you should check the return code. If you don't want to write with proper error reporting/recovery code immediately, there is always the assert() macro, e.g.:

if(func_which_might_fail() == ERROR_OCCURRED) assert(0);

If assert(0) gets called the program will stop immediately, and you can inspect the problem in detail with a debugger. Easy peasy.

Re: problems, lol

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been no big changes, other than the introduction of these newer languages. The idea of corporate backing is a red herring. Java is backed by Oracle, but just barely.

(Oracle's plan to make money from Java mostly centers around suing Google. Otherwise, it's clear they have no intention of doing anything interesting with Java. I'm kind of hoping Oracle "OpenOffices" Java and just gives it to some organization like the ASF.)

What you are seeing is entirely natural and should surprise nobody. The dominating cost of producing and maintaining software is in the human programmers who produce and maintain that software.

It's not about low-level versus high-level, bare-metal versus elegant abstractions. It's about that magical word that C-suites love to consider: productivity.

Languages (and environments... that's the real kicker. C would be fine if it has e.g. the rich ecosystem of easily-available libraries that Java does) that allow programmers to solve problems faster are the ones that will get used the most. Write a single-threaded web server? Java: 5 minutes. C: more. There is just more code to write. Yes, you could cheat and use a library (just like Java does!) in C but most people have no clue how to locate that library, build that library, deploy that library, etc. In Java, you just look at the java doc for the standard libra and you are off to the races.

GUIs? Same. Accessing a database? Same.

I'm not saying it can't be done: it certainly can. But it takes more time. And it takes more expensive programmers. Why would most companies pay for that when they can get more bang for their buck elsewhere? The answer is that they won't.

When does C get used? When it has to be used. Operating systems. Real-time devices. Embedded devices (though this is becoming less and less necessary as the difference between what most of us would classify as "embedded" blurs significantly... Raspberry Pis have giga of RAM now... Sheesh). Exotic hardware where talking to the bare metal without any interstitial layers fouling everything up.

Oh, and it also gets used at shops where the existing programmers are C experts and insist that C is the best language for everything. Those companies are probably wasting their money, in general.

C will always have a place, and a good one at that. But it's never going to be dominant again. There are just far more projects out there where another language/environment choice are going to yield faster results, and thus cost less money.

Re:problems, lol

[Christian Smith]

Exceptions are possible in C. See the documentation for setjmp() and longjmp().

That said, exceptions are just "kicking the can down the road" for error handling. If a function call can fail, then you should check the return code. If you don't want to write with proper error reporting/recovery code immediately, there is always the assert() macro, e.g.:

if(func_which_might_fail() == ERROR_OCCURRED) assert(0);

If assert(0) gets called the program will stop immediately, and you can inspect the problem in detail with a debugger. Easy peasy.

Urgh, no. Never, ever do this. assert() usually becomes a no-op when compiling stuff without debug flags, so binaries shipped to the field will mysteriously ignore errors in ways that can't be reproduced in a debugger.

One thing that shouldn't change between debug and production code is error detection and handling. In this sense, exceptions are ideal, as handling only needs to happen as and when errors occur, and the common case of no errors incurs little (setjmp/longjmp) to no (exception tables) overhead.

Plus exceptions are less laborious to handle. You can have a single try/catch for a whole block of code, instead of testing and handling each and every function that could fail. If you write exception safe code, then that's all you need to do, and you can clean up failed operations in the exception handlers.

Re:problems, lol

[david_thornley]

Anyone who knows C should be able to rattle off some problems.

The operator precedence is screwy. Switch statement case fallthrough is a pitfall. The fact that = is an operator, not part of a statement, makes errors easier. There's a lot of undefined behavior for which no diagnostics are required, and which doesn't look dodgy. The string library is awkward and somewhat inconsistent (check out what strncpy() actually does). Memory management and pointer arithmetic are necessary in far too many contexts. The confusion of byte and character worked only as long as everybody using C used ASCII, and makes things messy with Unicode. Arrays and pointers are sorta the same thing. It doesn't compile well with modern tools.

C is a good language, but anyone who thinks it doesn't have problems is fooling themselves.

Another issue is that C++ is better at everything. It's almost a superset of C, and does a lot more. You can use C++ in a limited fashion to get around most of the problems of C without causing more problems. It's easier to write a C compiler, of course, but there are platforms without good and readily accessible C compilers that use C++ just fine.

Re:problems, lol

[Just Some Guy]

I write web services for remote clients to send information to. 50 msec includes the time to establish a TCP connection to the nginx frontend (written in C!), then to run a little bit of Python code to massage the request and either store it in a database (probably written in C, or maybe Java) or fetch data from one, then to return the results to the remote client. At a previous employer, my code did that about 80,000 times per second, averaged 24/7. At the shop before that, we load tested to 500,000 requests per second but it was only for a few minutes sustained at a time.

When was the last time you personally wrote code to handle 500Kops? Did you know that those durn whippersnappers at Google runs a big chunk of their stack on Python and that they'd laugh at our tiny it doesn't matter to the end user. If we could have reduced a 50ms transaction to 10ms by altering the speed of the light signals carrying our requests, we probably would have. But since we live in a universe with physics, the best we could possible hope for was to reduce the time spent in application code to 0.000ms and thereby drop the entire transaction time to 49ms.

Re:problems, lol

[serviscope_minor]

Yeah but who has the time to

Re:problems, lol

[Aighearach]

The real problem with C is that...

People keep trying to push that, forgetting that people who agreed already switched to C++, or at least are using GCC extensions.

While I don't doubt that there are people who avoided C99 who will love C11, most of the people using C are using C99 and won't be willing to consider adopting whatever was added in `11 until 2020 or later.

I think it is safe to say that the vast majority of people still using C do not want language innovation, they want feature stability.

Re:problems, lol

[flargleblarg]

An assertion should just be the evaluation of a boolean expression.

Assertions can be anything you want them to be. There is no (nor should there be) requirement that they be a boolean expression.

Sometimes it is sensible to say assert(foo_is_valid(foo)); on some object foo, and the foo_is_valid() call might need to do a lot of work.

Or... In an arbitrary precision integer arithmetic library, if you compute the quotient and remainder q and r of a divided by b, it is sensible right before returning to assert that b times q plus r equals a, which obviously incurs a significant speed penalty and should not be part of the production code if the math library needs to be as performant as possible.

I write assertions to document state and to help catch errors. I don't care how fast or slow they run. They are meant to be compiled out.

So what!

[no-body]

C is great - love it and if somebody shits on it, even more so!

Moronic Subject for an Article

[hoofie]

This really is a moronic article. Programming language choice is not about "popular" or "cool" - it's whatever tool gets the job done. The article also takes a whack at COBOL and Fortran. They might be old but they have been around a long time and are still in heavy use in many areas. The article also ignores things like microcontrollers, arduinos etc whose development tooling invariably uses C. The whole thing reads like it was written by a newly minted graduate.

Re:Moronic Subject for an Article

[David Greene]

Yep. Most people don't know about the semantic advantages Fortran has over C or that its syntax allows for compact expression of complex calculations. C is no more a Fortran replacement than Fortran is a C replacement.

Re:Moronic Subject for an Article

[lgw]

This really is a moronic article. Programming language choice is not about "popular" or "cool" - it's whatever tool gets the job done.

For a hobby? Sure. Otherwise it's about whatever tool gets the paycheck done. Java sucks today and isn't the best tool for any job, yet it dominates the job market. It was a bad tool 15 years ago, and it will be a bad tool 15 years from now, when it will still dominate the job market. And by then, sadly, $10 computers will run Java easily.

C will always be the kernel guy's tool, and those jobs pay nicely, but there will never be very many of them. C++ has faded (despite being a darn good language with the latest standard, too many burned bridges). C# will go down with the Microsoft ship. Will one of the new fad languages have staying power? Maybe. Likely 1 of them will, if not a current one. But fucking Java just refuses to die.

Re:Moronic Subject for an Article

[roca]

Java is the new COBOL. Given we need a language for that role, I actually think Java's pretty good.

Re:Moronic Subject for an Article

[techno-vampire]

As far as I know, JPL is still using a program written in the late '70s or early '80s by Dan Alderson in FORTRAN for spacecraft navigation and maneuvering. The language it was written in may not be popular now, but the program Just Works, so there's no reason to re-invent that particular wheel.

Re:Moronic Subject for an Article

[0100010001010011]

BLAS and LINPACK are used everywhere in Engineering tools. Numpy, Scipy, Matlab, Mathematica, et al are all just pretty wrappers on top of the FORTRAN that does the heavy lifting. It's why compiling from source also requires a Fortran compiler.

They've been vetted, tested, vetted more, and been running Engineering applications since the 70s.

Re:Moronic Subject for an Article

[WaffleMonster]

2 decades and continued growth demonstrate languages like Java and Javascript do indeed have that. What precisely is it about Java that you're having so much difficulty with?

What I have difficulty with is understanding what software of any significance in my life is actually written in Java. The last time I installed from scratch didn't even bother installing a java runtime. Didn't see the point.

People keep talking about how these languages are so great and so much better yet the one thing that has always been missing was the translation of that fanboyism into anything useful.

Where are the operating systems and non-trivial games and browsers and codecs and network stacks and relational databases and shit written in these languages? Where are the outcomes commensurate with the claims? Isn't "two decades of continued growth" ... long enough?

Re:Moronic Subject for an Article

[Darinbob]

If C doesn't have it's own Facebook page, then how can Kanye give it his blessing?

Re:Moronic Subject for an Article

[Anne Thwacks]

Java is the new COBOL

So your CFO and auditor can read it?

I don't think you understand the point of COBOL, which is "while it is very long-winded and a struggle to write, it is possible for lay people to read, and (at least the evidence suggests) maintain 50 year old code after the original author has died".

If you write COBOL, you probably spend two days reading the background info and requirements docs for every ten minutes you spend writing code anyway.

Good luck getting an accountant to understand 50 year old Java.

Re:Moronic Subject for an Article

[TheRaven64]

Java isn't a bad language. It's a constrained language, but in general it's constrained in a good way. It may make it difficult to write the best solution, but it makes it impossible to write the ten worst solutions and easiest to write a not-too-bad solution to any given problem. It also strongly encourages modularity and provides tools for reducing privilege for parts of a program so that you don't need to trust all programmers in your address space equally. It's certainly not the best tool for all jobs, but if you have a complex business application that you want to support for a long time with relatively high programmer turnover, it's far from the worst tool.

Re:Moronic Subject for an Article

[Lawrence_Bird]

And people forget what COBOL means - common business oriented language. COBOL is all about data in and data/reports out. It is not about pretty, new shiny.

C's problem?

[ugen]

C has what problem? Lack of social media popularity with hipster morons? It's a programming language, not a popularity contest. This kind of shit lately on slashdot really starts getting old. Who runs this place?

Re:C's problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

To some extent it IS a popularity contest. C is no longer taught in many universities so the next gen of programmers won't have any experience with it, which means they'll avoid it for doing projects in their careers. Languages CAN die. Well, not 100% - there are weird things still in use - but in practice they can, if their user base becomes too small. C isn't close to that point at the current time. But if the vector is the wrong way, that isn't a good sign at all.

End of coding

[OrangeTide]

Us C programmers have already written everything there is to write.

Feel free to reinvent the wheel in various toy languages if that is what makes you happy, I soon will retire and won't care.

Consider the methodology

[GrumpySteen]

Basically the calculation comes down to counting hits for the search query "language programming"

It doesn't matter if those results are positive or negative. All that matters is the number. If you make a language and get ten billion people to post on indexed sites about how badly your language sucks, your language would take the top spot on the TIOBE Index.

So... yeah. This is about as lame of an index as you could possibly come up with.

We have K&R on PDF

[perpenso]

From TFS, "c's problems": c doesn't have "problems"; programmers who don't use c have problems.

That is actually what TIOBE measures. It counts Google searches. C programmers are smart enough that they don't need to search for answers on Google, or they use a better website, such as Stackoverflow.

We use neither google nor stack overflow, we have K&R on PDF.

Its really the library not the language

[perpenso]

Java is the new COBOL. Given we need a language for that role, I actually think Java's pretty good.

As one of my professors once argued, its usually the accompanying libraries that make or break a language in more recent years. Java's advantage is simply a "more capable" "standard library".

Also we went recently through a phase in computer science education where people were really only taught java. Its the only tool in their toolbox.

Re:Its really the library not the language

[ShakaUVM]

> Also we went recently through a phase in computer science education where people were really only taught java. Its the only tool in their toolbox.

Yep. I went through the curriculum of the top 10 computer science universities in the country, and all of them teach either Java or Python in their introductory programming classes.

Only a single one (Stanford) even offered C++ as an alternative.

Which is why I'm working on a tool that will hopefully make C++ more appealing to educators, by replacing the traditionally horrendous error messages with an easy to read paragraph targeted at newbie programmers. I'll be presenting it at CppCon next month.

Re:Yeah, it sucks, but, then, C not an easy langua

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is not C's fault.

Some macro packages are indeed horrid. That's not C's fault. Its absolutely possible to beautiful APIs in C. The UNIX file descriptor API is probably one of the first examples of object oriented programming and polymorphism, yet nobody ever gives it credit.

You do have to be able to manage pointers and memory in C, and if you use threads you have to be able to deal with currency. This is not rocket science, but it requires diligence.

I am particularly fond of Golang's C "flavor", while freeing the programmer from worrying about those things. If you have to solve a problem that Python or Perl would be your tool of choice for, I'd reach for Go instead.

If you have to be in a kernel, or performance critical code, then C is your choice.

And if you think your code isn't performance critical, you should double check your assumptions. Outside of administrative UIs, almost all code (IMO) is performance sensitive and critical. Programmer inability to understand this is responsible for a lot of the carelessness and bloat that has resulted in UIs that struggle to run in gigabytes of memory, when we had perfectly functional programs in the past that ran in tiny fractions of that. (Yes, there is a cost to features, but I still see a *lot* of pointless bloat and programmer carelessness...)

Re:Rust is going to eat C's lunch

[roca]

Rust allows programming "closer to the metal" than those languages. For example, Go, Nim, Scala and Haxe all require a garbage collector in practice for significantly complex programs. This makes it difficult (or at least heavyweight) to embed components in those languages into other languages and makes memory usage more difficult to reason about. This makes it easier to use Rust as a drop-in replacement for C or C++.

(Rust has other advantages over each of those other languages too.)

Re:Rust is going to eat C's lunch

[Anne Thwacks]

2017 will be the year of Snobol!

Re:I think Java is a well designed language

[Anne Thwacks]

less widely bused software.

I think you will find Java software is widely abused - usually with a wide variety of unprintable expletives.

"Some people swear by Java - the rest of us swear at it."

Overall I prefer the IEEE stats more

[Ambassador Kosh]

The IEEE seems to have a much better methodology and ways to look at the data based on web, mobile, enterprise and embedded markets.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/stati...

It just seems that the TIOBE results are much easier to bias by things like universities using a language as a teaching language. There are far more online courses on things like java and languages commonly used for web work but that does not make them more commonly used just more common to have webpages written about them.

New to programming and C is my first choice

[scrambled_binary]

Not worth much since I'm new to programming but when I began researching which language to start with it seems almost every language refers back to C or a variant of C. It just made sense to me to start with C and that it would be a valuable skill.

In other exciting news

[LichtSpektren]

The hammer just passed the screwdriver again on the Household Tools Popularity List. Is it because the hammer has the venerable backing of large companies like Lowe's and Home Depot while the lowly screwdriver is still seen to be a hobbyist's tool unfit for enterprise adoption?

Stay tuned for next month's exciting random statistical variations and the inane commentary from bloggers desperate for clicks!

C programmers don't need to consult the web

[KeithH]

This TIOBE index relies on web queries for each programming language. Frankly, C programmers don't need to ask questions about the language itself since it is so simple.

I'm not questioning the popularity of the various languages but it seems to me that this metric favours the more complex languages.

Finally, in the embedded real-time space, there is still no real substitute for C.

Ok, it's down, but those are weird reasons

[HeckRuler]

It's still #2. And twice the index score of #3.

mobile app development. ... The constraint that C object code should remain small and fast doesn't help here.

Huh? That seems like exactly the sort of area where small and fast would help immensely.

I still find it infuriating when I want to have half a second for this clunky program on my phone to do it's thing.

Moreover the C programming language doesn't evolve like the other big languages such as Java, C++ and C#. There is a "new" C11 standard available but this contains only minor changes.

The language being stable is a good thing. A shining feature. Unless you enjoy all your skills turning to dust as you have to adapt to an ever changing platform. Who likes to build a house on shifting sand?

Yet another reason why C is getting into trouble is that there is no big company promoting the language. Oracle supports Java, Microsoft supports C++, C# and TypeScript, Google supports Java, Python, Go, Dart and JavaScript, Apple promotes Swift and Objective-C, etc. but none of them supports C publicly.

Also kind of a good thing. Because it's "Oracle, where tech goes to die". And Microsoft, where they keep bloody changing everything because some minor boss somewhere gets a bonus if he can convince 9% of the MS developer base to register with SilverLight tools, or how Sharepoint is "the next big thing". And frankly, I was surprised that every Go project wasn't mandated to direct their users to go sign up for google+.

C is punk. Fuck corporate.

It's portable as all fucking get-out. Low enough that you can make it smokin' fast. And it doesn't play any games with magical crap you can't see. The code is truth in advertising (unless you fuck around with macros like an idiot), and that makes it easier to debug. And everything as C APIs, so if there's a library out there you want you can typically go hook into it. Every bloody language has weird quirks and nuances you just have to be aware of. The tools that help you use the language are where it's at. MVS, while run by Satan, is actually pretty decent. But the classic C tools of makefiles, gcc or clang, and vim are powerhouses of usability that have been refined for decades. It's not the best if you want to talk to browsers. Javascript is the defacto standard there. And it's not the best if you just want to make yet another GUI button clicker for clueless suit. And Bash or whatever script of choice glues together the solutions of yesterday. But C is what you whip out for the hard cases for real meaningful programming. And certainly for anything critical like life support, satellites, weapon platforms, or kernels.