Is The C Programming Language Declining In Popularity? (dice.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Java overtook C as the most popular language in mid-2015 on the TIOBE Programming Community index. But now over the last 13 months, they show C's popularity consistently dropping more and more. C's score had hovered between 15% and 20% for over 15 years but as 2016 ended, the language's popularity is now down to 8.7%. "There is no clear way back to the top," reports the site, asking what happened to C? "It is not a language that you think of while writing programs for popular fields such as mobile apps or websites, it is not evolving that much and there is no big company promoting the language."

But the Insights blog at Dice.com counters that TIOBE "has hammered on C for quite some time. Earlier this year, it again emphasized how C is 'hardly suitable for the booming fields of web and mobile app development.' That being said, job postings on Dice (as well as rankings compiled by other organizations) suggest there's still widespread demand for C, which can be used in everything from operating systems to data-intensive applications, and serves many programmers well as an intermediate language."
i-programmer suggests this could just be an artifact of the way TIOBE calculates language popularity (by totaling search engine queries). Noting that Assembly language rose into TIOBE's top 10 this year, their editor wrote, "Perhaps it is something to do with the poor state of assembly language documentation that spurs on increasingly desperate searches for more information." Maybe C programmers are just referring to their K&R book instead of searching for solutions online?

Comments

The problem with the metric

[isj]

"i-programmer suggests this could just be an artifact of the way TIOBE calculates language popularity (by totaling search engine queries). "

The TIOBE index is not based on the number of queires (see http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-ind...).

It is based on the number of results on the query " programming" in multiple search engines.

So the TIOBE index is "how much has been written online about "

Re:I'm seeing a resurgence in C

[EmeraldBot]

"New languages"?

Pssht! As if!

Man, there's so many varieties of Object-Oriented C you could jizz your pants without even touching yourself.

C is the Primal Language. Before C we have clicks and whistles.

This isn't even a fucking conversation. I'm not hearing what anybody says except my own opinion, because I know my opinion is right, so this isn't a conversation.

What did that dude say in "Fight Club"? "This. Conversation. Is. Over."? Right? Well man thissuh conuhversationuh isuh nottah happenun.

This is some bullshit. Fuck, there are HLA interpreters that are more popular than JAVA -- WITH PEOPLE WHO KNOW HOW TO CODE.

Man this is so much bullshit. I can't believe there's no viewpoint, no slant, no perspective, no synonym of whatsoever with this article.

That's the new owners of Slashdot. This site is dead. If you can diss C because some homie of yours called you up and needed some help raising interest in some particular market, towards a hopeful stock point, maybe on some IPO to come, maybe on something pre-existing, then fuck it, it ain't news any more, man, and it ain't for anybody but the "business school" {nested: "nerds"}.

When you say things like "This isn't even a fucking conversation. I'm not hearing what anybody says except my own opinion, because I know my opinion is right, so this isn't a conversation" and "What did that dude say in 'Fight Club'? 'This. Conversation. Is. Over.'? Right? Well man thissuh conuhversationuh isuh nottah happenun.", It becomes blindingly obvious you are either high on drugs, drunk with some shots I would pay to learn the composition of, or suffer an untreated case of a narcissistic personality disorder combined with the temperament of a three year old, because this is a public. forum, not your personal soapbox. You want to rant on about how unfair a major index has ranked a language you imply you know very little about, without any rational debate, feel free to take it to your Twitter page.

Oh. And uh, while I personally believe it's unethical to provoke those who are (at least at present) mentally incapacitated, I thought I should show you a little what the previous owners of Slashdot, Dice, ran a few years ago. I can sense the sound of your head exploding, eh?

Re:I'm seeing a resurgence in C

[darthsilun]

C is the Primal Language. Before C we have clicks and whistles.

Before C we had B, and APL, PL/1, Cobol, and Fortran, just to name a few.
Come up for air sometime, it really helps clear your head.

Re:We're all programming in Machine Code

[hey!]

C was conceived as a portable shorthand for assembly language. It has evolved into its own beast over the decades - especially when you include C++.

It makes no sense to include C++, just because C++ shares certain elements with C. The design philosophy is completely different. C is a minimalist language. It has acquired more features over the years, like unicode support, but based on demonstrable need. C++ is more prescriptive in its philosophy: these are the features you should be using if you want to be doing object oriented programming.

Re:We're all programming in Machine Code

[hey!]

I'm well aware of this, but it doesn't change the fact that C++ is a different language with a fundamentally different philosophy. Adding features to a language is not some kind of neutral operation; it can affect users that have no intention of using those features.

Were it not for operation overloading the argument that C++ is simply C with classes would be a lot stronger. Then if you came across the expression "a + b", you would know it means exactly what "a + b" means in C: either integer addition, floating point addition, possibly with an implicit typecast on one of the operands. In C++ the "+" might be something else altogether; it might even have side effects.

This is neither good nor bad, but it's unquestionably different.

Oh, and by the way, moderators: troll? Really?