Slashdot Mirror
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?
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?
Your compiler is programming in machine code. You just feed it hints.
Feed your compiler some good hints and it might even write code to use the full width of those vector registers your processor has but you were ignoring.
I'm seeing a resurgence in C. It seems to be coming from several different directions.
The first is from people like Mike Acton:
CppCon 2014: Data Oriented Design
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The second is from all the new languages like Go, Rust, Swift. All these new languages need libraries so they all built in good C interoperability so they could be useful immediately without requiring ground up new implementations of everything. So I'm seeing more new pure C libraries being created now than I've seen in a very long time. Library developers know that their libraries will be usable from every language if they write it in pure C.
The third is from IoT. Embedded developers never left C. Now with IoT growing, C lives on.
In all of these cases, they might fly under TIOBE's radar. Most of these people probably don't need to search for C. They already know it and are too busy working on their projects.
They're much more like: "Why does processor X on board Y rev1 have I2C on those pins, but on rev2 accessing those causes a reboot. Who thought that was a good idea? Can I LART them? And how can I detect board version in software?"
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
I'll add that every C/C++ IDE I've used has really good built-in documentation and search features. I've rarely felt the need to google something when programming in C/C++.
OTOH when I was writing stuff in Perl or PHP, I was googling stuff constantly because the documentation is online and the sites' search feature sucks.
Search engine metrics are also flawed in another way; the worst examples of things often generate a lot of searches, but that doesn't mean they're popular. This metric would tell us that the most popular financial company is Wells Fargo. They're at the top because of the news that they created millions of fraudulent accounts, however, and not because they're popular.