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Google's Go Language Surges In Popularity (infoworld.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the go-Go-go dept.

2016 saw a big spike in the popularity of Go, attributed to the rising importance of Docker and Kubernetes. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes InfoWorld: Ranked 65th a year ago in the Tiobe Index of language popularity, it has climbed to 16th this month and is on track to become Tiobe's Programming Language of the Year, a designation awarded to the language with the biggest jump in the index...which gauges popularity based on a formula assessing searches on languages in popular search engines...

Elsewhere in the index, Java again came in first place, with an 18.799 rating while C, still in second place, nonetheless continued its precipitous drop, to 9.835% (it had been 16.185% a year ago). In third was C++ (5.797%) followed by C# (4.367%), Python (3.775%), JavaScript (2.751%), PHP (2.741%), Visual Basic .Net (2.66%), and Perl (2.495%).
The article also cites an alternate set of rankings. "In the PyPL index, the top 10 were: Java, with a share of 23.4%, followed by Python (13.6%), PHP (9.9%), C# (8.8%), JavaScript (7.6%), C++ (6.9%), C (6.9%), Objective-C (4.5%), R (3.3%), and Swift (3.1%)."

4 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. But what is it used for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I looked for use cases a while back and couldn't find anything except crawlers.

    I hate how easily programmers jump on a bandwagon.

    1. Re:But what is it used for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm pretty sure the smart people at Google didn't get any of those memos

      Have you seen the Google Style Guide for C++ when they first released it on svn? It was written for C with classes, some of the desicions were based on having simple text search as only available tool for code lookup, others were base on C++ predating the 98 standard and more based on legacy issues.

      Basically Googles biggest problem with C++ was a large codebase of legacy code nobody wanted to touch and Go solved this by simply throwing everything away, starting from scratch. It means maintaining less since they can just chuck decades of work into the garbage bin everytime they hire a new Rob Pike.

  2. Go is a very very nice language to work on by Lisandro · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I wish the standard library came with more goodies (Python can really spoil you in that sense) and that it was a bit more expressive - generic programming f.ex. would be a godsend. But hose will probably happen in the future. It is an otherwise fast, clean and well designed language, which thanks Baby Jesus isn't obsessed with OOP.

  3. Re:I bet half the people who said "C" actually by BESTouff · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Forcing projects to C avoids possible bugs and unreadable code from cowboy programmers on your team using some of the more esoteric features of C++.

    This ! I've been working in several embedded systems companies, and we always have avoided C++ precisely because of this.

    It also is a requirement for embedded systems, which includes everything for an arduino and their bigger cousins.

    (OTOH not really this, I'm seeing more high-level languages, even JS, everywhere)