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

We're all programming in Machine Code

[Big Hairy Ian]

Bear in mind almost all of the rival languages were written in C themselves and C is written in machine code most of us are programming in C and Machine Code anyway. In the end we're all writing Machine Code we've just wrapped it up in a nicer package is all

Oh gosh

[Anonymous Coward]

Not again.

Search engine?

[denisbergeron]

Everybody that work recently with C IDE knows that you don't need search the web to find information !

Re:Search engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even without an IDE.

C is simple enough not to need a lot of searching to find out how to do things - unlike nearly all the OO languages.

Assembly got searched for more due to the shift from Intel to ARM. Also searches for Intel assembly grow due to all the crap intel has had to add to a poor instruction design to maintain "compatibility". If the RISC underpinnings of the X86 (both 32 and 64 bit lines) were accessible the speed would increase by 10-15%.

Bullshit metrics

[_merlin]

I don't use much straight C these days (mostly C++ with bits of Python, lua, PHP and other stuff for glue, and occasional C#), but the metric is bullshit. It's a measure of which languages are most suited to passing roadblocks using search queries including the language name. This tends to select for how much a language is used by inexperienced developers.

I'm a pretty experienced C++ developer, so I'm unlikely to be putting C++ in search engine queries. I know the language and library pretty well. If I want to get reference for a particular standard library feature, I'll use a query like, "codecvt site:en.cppreference.com". If I want docs for a Linux feature (e.g. routing sockets or the capabilities API), I'll pull up a man page. If I want to know what some ioctl does and the docs are lacking, I'll look at the Linux kernel source. I'm not typing C++ into google when I'm doing my day job or open source work. Same applies for other programming languages I'm competent with. I do bits of assembly language, but I'm not typing that into Google. I have user mode architecture manuals for the processors I need to deal with, and ABI manuals for the operating systems.

On the other hand, I'm far more likely to put the name of a language I'm less familiar with and only use occasionally into a search query when I'm trying to find the conventional way to do something. Something like "C# confirm close modified document window", "python open subprocess stderr", or "php openssl rsa". I'm a clueless goon when it comes to available libraries and best practices for these languages, so I boost their TIOBE rankings on the occasions when I have to use them, while my bread-and-butter C++, assembly language and C don't show up, despite working in C++ for the bulk of my programming time.

Betteridge's law

[fnj]

Betteridge's law of headlines. Answer is no. HELL no. Hell no, you royal asshole. Discussion terminated. OK?

Re:We're all programming in Machine Code

[truedfx]

C compilers haven't been written in machine code or even assembly for a long time, aside from a rare few. They've been written in C themselves for a while, but today's most common C compilers are written in C++.

Re:Fuck You New Slashdot Owners, Fuck You

[EmeraldBot]

You're so busy fucking yourselves, maybe all you need is a good hearty fuck you to shut your stupid ass the fuck up.

Really contributes to the discussion, a fantastic way to convince someone you are a reasonable person with a well thought out position.

Why don't you go ask mother fucking ANSI what they think about C's popularity?

I'm not sure what ANSI is supposed to help us, all they do is set standards. May as well as IEEE what they think of TCP's popularity.

Why don't you go around and check to see what code is compiling and executing?

This is so vague as to being entirely meaningless, but alright. Javascript is considered the world's #1 compiled language. Java bytecode comes after. Maybe Shell scripting or Python after that. Aside from how asinine and useless those measures are, since they tell you nothing about its popularity with developers, it seems awfully strange to pick a fight with a language that is only ever compiled once and never formally executed in its original form.

Why don't you fucking just learn a tiny little bit about the history of programming languages and their derivatives

I'm not sure what the history of programming languages is supposed to do about what today's measures are, given that how it scored in the past has little bearing on how useful it is today. I'm completely confused as to what you even mean by that, or why you even put it in here. Perhaps, because like the rest of your post, it was entirely devoid of any rational point or argument?

your stupid caking piehole about shit that you shouldn't even be propagandizing about, stop dumbing people the fuck down, and just to reiterate, the the fucking holy hell up?

You state things much more bluntly then I would like, but at its core, perhaps yes. If you have nothing to contribute, take your meds, knock yourself out, and stop vomiting yourself all over this page.

Re:We're all programming in Machine Code

[Anonymous Coward]

C is a portable shorthand for assembly language.

Submitter is clueless - 99.9% of web sites run on

[raymorris]

Quoting TFS, "t is not a language that you think of while writing programs for popular fields such as mobile apps or websites". Submitter clearly doesn't have much idea how web sites work. For web sites, your browser (a C or C++ program) sends a request through routers running Cisco iOS (a C program) to a web server such as Apache (a C program), which may run a module such as mod_php (a C program) which in turn probably runs a library such as ImageMagick (a C program) which generates the content. The content is fed back through the web server (still C) to your browser. For larger sites, there is often a proxy in the middle, such as Squid (written in C) or mod_proxy (more C).

actually a good metric

[aepervius]

A language is thriving or dying by the number of inexperienced developper trying to learn it. If no inexperienced cev learn it... it is dying. See the experienced dev of today were the noob of yesterday. If everybody is learning c# or java it is a pretty good indication of what the future of c, c++ will be. For reference see cobol. But rejoice , a dying or less used language means that for us the kldr gen, assured contracts works.

C is only dying in the buzz department

[JoeyRox]

C is not the next great thing. But is still the one of the best things and will always be a workhorse.

C is slowly being replaced by C++

[cpghost]

C isn't dying, but I think that it is being slowly replaced more and more by C++. Not all of a sudden, but when new code gets added, it is just more convenient to use std::string, RAII, the whole C++ Standard Library. Especially since C++11, C++ and its library have matured a lot to actually become useful and have you write beautiful and fast/efficient code, thanks to move semantics. So no, C isn't dying, it is morphing into C++11 and later. Even for embedded and kernel-level programming: check out recent projects: many use C++, carefully avoiding features like virtual functions that would slow down running time. It is as good as C can get, only better.

Re:C is slowly being replaced by C++

[Dutch Gun]

The real problem with C++ is not slowness, but being too complex and unpredictable. I think that what will happen is that C will get the few good features from C++, and the rest will die.

You're correct that C++ is typically no slower than C, but it seems very unlikely to disappear anytime soon. There are probably billions of lines of C++ out in the real world. It will never be the most popular language, but it's a very significant one, and will be for quite some time. C++ is used when you need the performance of a to-the-metal compiled language like C, but need better abstraction models for large, complex systems. But unlike some other languages, you typically pay little to nothing extra for these abstractions, as the burden is shifted to the compiler. There are many times when performance really does matter, and you can't simply afford to throw more hardware at a problem, such as a very complex application on a single client PC, a videogame console, or at massive scales like in mega data centers.

If you think C++ is "unpredictable" then you just don't know the language all that well. I'm not trying to sound arrogant or condescending, as it's absolutely a difficult language to learn and especially difficult to master (hell, probably near impossible to master it *all*), but "unpredictable" is how you describe managed memory, not C++. Yes, C++ has a lot of sharp edges as a language. It's ugly, clunky, bloated (aka "feature-rich"), slow to compile, and difficult to master. But it also has a large, mature ecosystem (thanks to its C-based heritage), and damn near every significant CPU or platform has a C++ compiler that supports it, probably topped only by C.

So really, it's reasonably safe to say that neither C nor C++ are going anywhere anytime soon, thanks partially due to sheer inertia caused their pervasiveness through our critical infrastructure. This fact alone dictates that compiler support will remain a priority among major software companies (Microsoft, Intel, Apple) or projects (Clang, CGG). Add to that the enormous codebases that companies have invested in with both languages, and C/C++'s longevity is even more likely.

Re:We're all programming in Machine Code

[Highdude702]

Thank you! Im rather new here compared to you.. but in the 10 years or so ive been coming to this site. ive never seen it as bad as it is now. This is a ludacris post. To even fathom that C will die...

Re: We're all programming in Machine Code

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse than that. Since they base this on Internet searches, which is a metric only an idiot could think is good, you end up in a situation where dumbed down languages used by dumbed down people who are too stupid to even use those without handholding pump up search volume for those very same languages.

Re:We're all programming in Machine Code

[serviscope_minor]

I beg to differ: it IS bad. Because when you read a+b, you have NO idea what may be happening

I beg to differ with you!

If you see the function add(a, b), you have NO idea what may be happening. And this applies to ALL the functions. In C++ a+b simply means operator+(a,b) IOW it's a function with a funny syntax just like any other.

And the effect of the overloading can be completely different for various types.

Well of course, adding two floating point numbers is a very different operation to adding two integers. Totally different instructions. The former can even generate a floating point exception and crash your code if you've set the exception flags. And then there's adding two signed inegers. You can always safely add unsigned types. If you add signed ones, overflow invokes nasal demons.