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Best Open Source Software Identified By InfoWorld Listicles (infoworld.com)
An anonymous reader writes: InfoWorld announced the winners of this year's "Best of Open Source Software Awards" -- honoring 68 different projects, spread across five categories. Besides the 15 best software development tools, they also recognized the best cloud computing software, machine learning tools, and networking and security software (as well as the best databases and analytics tools).
"Open source software isn't what it used to be," writes Doug Dineley, the site's executive editor. "The term used to conjure images of the lone developer, working into the night and through weekends, banging out line after line of code to scratch a personal itch or realize a personal vision... But as you wend your way through our Bossie winners, you're bound to be struck by the number of projects with heavyweight engineering resources behind them... Elsewhere in the open source landscape, valuable engineering resources come together in a different way -- through the shared interest of commercial software vendors."
More than 10% of the awards went to the Apache Software Foundation -- 7 of the 68 -- though I was surprised to see that five of the best software development tools are languages -- specifically Kotlin, Go, Rust, Clojure, and Typescript. Two more of the best open source software development tools were Microsoft products -- .Net Core and Visual Studio Code. And in the same category was OpenRemote a home automation platform, as well as Ethereum, which "smells and tastes like an open source project that is solving problems and serving developers."
"Open source software isn't what it used to be," writes Doug Dineley, the site's executive editor. "The term used to conjure images of the lone developer, working into the night and through weekends, banging out line after line of code to scratch a personal itch or realize a personal vision... But as you wend your way through our Bossie winners, you're bound to be struck by the number of projects with heavyweight engineering resources behind them... Elsewhere in the open source landscape, valuable engineering resources come together in a different way -- through the shared interest of commercial software vendors."
More than 10% of the awards went to the Apache Software Foundation -- 7 of the 68 -- though I was surprised to see that five of the best software development tools are languages -- specifically Kotlin, Go, Rust, Clojure, and Typescript. Two more of the best open source software development tools were Microsoft products -- .Net Core and Visual Studio Code. And in the same category was OpenRemote a home automation platform, as well as Ethereum, which "smells and tastes like an open source project that is solving problems and serving developers."
The Rust programming language made their list of top dev tools and this is great to see! Rust really deserves this recognition because it is one of the few languages really pushing ahead the state of the art. C and C++ and Java were good for writing the kind of software we've used during the last 50 years, but Rust delivers what we'll need to write software for the next 100 to 200 years. Rust is built from the ground up to handle large software systems running on computers with many CPU cores and in hostile environments like the Internet. It's well positioned to meet our current and future programming needs. The community is also one of the friendliest I've ever dealt with. They know their stuff and they're always willing to help. Rust is the future and getting this recognition is just what it needs for more people to learn about all that it can offer.
Why do these little-used programming languages like Kotlin, Scala, Go, Rust, Clojure and TypeScript get so much attention?
I can't think of any notable software that's written in Kotlin, Scala or Clojure. Shit, I don't even know why they're in a list for 2017. Scala and Clojure were hyped several years ago, and the hype died out soon afterward. I don't even think Kotlin has ever gotten much hype at all.
TypeScript basically just makes JavaScript a less-stupid language. It's not like it extends JavaScript in any real way. It just provides some hacks to hide really glaring flaws in JavaScript.
Rust is a fucking joke, I think. I can only think of two things written in Rust: the Rust implementation and Servo. Having used both, I am not impressed. When I used it, I found the Rust implementation to be slow and bloated. I think that Servo is a total failure, too. Rust code is really awful to read and understand, even for people experienced with a complex language like C++. It's like the community is more obsessed with codes of conduct and social justice than they are with creating a useful language, too.
Out of all of those languages, at least Go has gotten some use. It's still a shitty language, in my opinion, but at least it's not a total failure like the others that were listed.
None of these languages deserve even a fraction of the attention and hype that they've been getting. We still see pretty much all important software being written in languages like C++, Java, Python and C. Even C# and PHP are more important than the languages that were chosen as being the "best" in 2017.
That's funny, I've been making a pretty fair living using nothing -but- FOSS for the last 20 years.
I just bought a second home on a nice lake in the Southeast US. With money I didn't have to spend on Windows licenses.