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Coders In Wealthy and Developing Countries Lean on Different Programming Languages (vice.com)
Stack Overflow data scientist David Robinson published an interesting observation: There exists a small but meaningful divide between the programming technologies used in wealthy countries and those used in developing countries. From a report: To be sure, programmers everywhere tend to build things with the same tools, which makes sense because software is a global industry. The first is in data science, which tends to employ the programming languages Python and R. "Python is visited about twice as often in high-income countries as in the rest of the world, and R about three times as much," Robinson writes. "We might also notice that among the smaller tags, many of the greatest shifts are in scientific Python and R packages such as pandas, numpy, matplotlib and ggplot2. This suggests that part of the income gap in these two languages may be due to their role in science and academic research. It makes sense these would be more common in wealthier industrialized nations, where scientific research makes up a larger portion of the economy and programmers are more likely to have advanced degrees." C and C++ use is similarly skewed toward wealthy countries. This is likely for a similar reason. These are languages that are pushed in American universities. They also tend to be used in highly specialized/advanced programming fields like embedded software and firmware development where you're more likely to find engineers with advanced degrees.
C and C++ are used more in the U.S. because at one point in time, the U.S. was the only country using those languages. It took other nations to catch up with our IT industry, and when they did they chose more modern languages (I suspect Java and C# are the most popular), while in the U.S. many places were stuck with C and C++.
If you are applying for a job and you want less competition from Pajeets and women, study C or C++.
This appears to indicate that most programming in growing countries that are building their success in the mobile age is on web implementations. That should surprise nobody.
On the other hand, countries that established their high tech bona fides long ago still have activity in the languages of long ago and languages designed for R&D.
It also means that, in terms of bulk, the up-and-comers are doing more work than the maintainers of the old status quo.
So what does that leave? Is Visual Basic being pirated left and right all over the Third World?
If you don't use Rust, you're in a devolving country.
I've read that Java was designed to be usable by 'mediocre' programmers. I take it the idea was you could hire people who weren't master programmers and get something working that didn't have a lot of subtle bugs like memory leaks that were going to come back and haunt you later. Also it was supposed to be very portable. I never used Java so I don't know how well it met those goals, but I can see how they would be desirable from a management point of view but not so much from a pure computer scientist's POV.
Haskell is a language where once you get your program to run at all it usually runs correctly. My very limited experience with it is that it requires a very mathematical sort of mind (so maybe I'm the 'mediocre programmer' when it comes to Haskell) and it's hard to know exactly what's happening under the hood so one could run in to performance issues.
One metric that I find appealing is, what language requires the least amount of lines of code. Bugs are often related to lines of code, also, if you're maintaining code, the fewer lines to look at the better. But I can see how a language designed just to be terse could be difficult. (APL anyone?)
The ideal language would probably have to find a balance between various requirements. Something where bugs could be caught easily, yet had a lot of power. It shouldn't be so complicated that few people ever master the entire language. (C++?) So it should be 'elegant' and 'expressive'. How does one measure elegance and expressiveness? And, once you've got this wonderful language, how do you promote it?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
The Python and R thing is one I can understand in a somewhat positive way. The US can afford more pure research for the time being though at some point we should think about going back to work.
But, because device programming is a relatively small market, I'm guessing the C/C++ dominance has more to do with a lot of people stuck maintaining old code or programming for military application instead of making new and exciting developments.
It would be interesting to see if the C/C++ gap is narrowing or widening. If narrowing, the legacy load is falling. If widening, it could be an anchor chained to our waste.
Cheap shit
This is no forking joking matter, don't dongle it up.
People in wealthy countries are the ones that are developing the new languages.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
They should have taken some other thing that is correlated to affluence. May be per capita meat consumption or access to healthcare. Then they could have come up with even more dramatic headline, "Meat eaters hack in C++ while the lotus eaters struggle with R". "Coders who get annual physical program in C++, while hackers might be sick stick with R".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
... that they're trying to correlate various things that ultimately boil down to "mostly US people visit stackoverflow", which probably isn't caused by income gaps or programming language used. Location and spoken language, however... so it comes down to claiming "speaking english makes rich, not speaking english makes poor". Right.
High-flying science, this. If you were meaning "science" to mean "pigs", at least.
If you are really looking for an "Ideal language", maybe you should pay attention on what's going on in the "old" languages instead of focusing on new ones. Fortran, COBOL, Pascal and others, even C++ itself are all evolving, taking concepts from one another. I would dare to say they are slowly converging, though they will never become one.
This trend should give you some good clues on what's really good to have in an "ideal" language. If a professional developer community take the task to adjourn their already working, time-tested language, they will add what they really need, and not what some academic thinks it could be nice (I still facepalm for C++ not having a native string type) or what someone thinks it's cool to have, just to give it a try.
Seems a bit odd, I am in the US and do most everything using Bash, PHP and Python with a little XCode/Swift mixed in.
Also wonder why wealthier countries since PHP and Python have no Subscription/Buy It overhead.
That is why I stopped doing Windows/Visual Studio work years ago. And yes I do know they let Visual Studio go but have not had the desire to check it out again.
The best language, methodology, algorithm, compiler, toolchain, and design pattern is the one you *know*. I swear, there is more "gimme a shortcut to a $$$ job in IT" than I've ever seen (even in bodybuilding people don't lie as egregiously). People always want to find a shortcut. The truth is that the worthy pursuits that build your earning potential and coder-cred require mucho effort. Generally speaking, the folks with the most enthusiasm win because that gives them the most sticking power when they encounter all the crappy parts of being a coder &&|| a student. People who got into programming because they wanted a stable job are usually not the rockstar coders. In short, it pays to be passionate about it. If you can't be: think twice about doing it for a career.
That begs the question, if the civilize world uses C/C++ and R what do all the slants and sambo's use?