C Programming Language 'Has Completed a Comeback' (infoworld.com)

InfoWorld reports that "the once-declining C language" has "completed a comeback" -- citing its rise to second place in the Tiobe Index of language popularity, the biggest rise of any language in 2017. An anonymous reader quotes their report: Although the language only grew 1.69 percentage points in its rating year over year in the January index, that was enough beat out runners-up Python (1.21 percent gain) and Erlang (0.98 percent gain). Just five months ago, C was at its lowest-ever rating, at 6.477 percent; this month, its rating is 11.07 percent, once again putting it in second place behind Java (14.215 percent) -- although Java dropped 3.05 percent compared to January 2017. C's revival is possibly being fueled by its popularity in manufacturing and industry, including the automotive market, Tiobe believes...

But promising languages such as Julia, Hack, Rust, and Kotlin were not able to reach the top 20 or even the top 30, Tiobe pointed out. "Becoming part of the top 10 or even the top 20 requires a large ecosystem of communities and evangelists including conferences," said Paul Jansen, Tiobe managing director and compiler of the index. "This is not something that can be developed in one year's time."
For 2017 Tiobe also reports that after Java and C, the most popular programming languages were C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, Visual Basic .Net, R, PHP, and Perl.

The rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index calculates that the most popular languages are Java, Python, PHP, JavaScript, C#, C++, C, R, Objective-C, and Swift.

Comments

Re:Don't call Tiobe a reliable metric

[OrangeTide]

C dev population stays about the same:

Some of us are getting quite old and have been dying off.

Re:Turbo Pascal

[OrangeTide]

Lazarus gets you the Object Pascal derived syntax from Turbo Pascal and Delphi, and provides an IDE available on multiple platforms. I've had zero problems installing it on several systems, mostly for quick and dirty projects where I didn't necessarily want to use C.

Re: C is still king, thank Engineering Schools

[prefec2]

You cannot write device drivers in Java or Python as both languages require either an interpreter alias virtual machine or a just in time compiler. Also they are not the right tool for that particular job. However, they are well suited for other tasks.

Re:C programs are too dangerous for net-connected

[TheRaven64]

Actually I think SQL injection probably accounts for a larger share than overflows

I don't have a more recent statistic, but an MSR study from 2012 found that around 70% of all exploited security vulnerabilities are buffer overflows.

Re:Driven by Raspberry Pi?

[TheRaven64]

The slowest Raspberry Pi has 512MB of RAM and a 700MHz 32-bit processor. The original Smalltalk-80 implementation ran on a 2MHz 16-bit processor with 512KB of RAM and contained a full graphical user interface and applications written entirely in Smalltalk, a pure object-oriented language that didn't even have concessions to implementation ease like primitive types or intraprocedural flow control[1]. It did use some clever microcode tricks to make things like screen updates faster, but even without these Smalltalk was quite performant on a 20MHz processor.

The idea that a RPi is too slow for a high-level language to be fast enough is astonishing.

[1] In Smalltalk, integers are immutable instances of the SmallInt class, which is typically implemented as a tagged pointer. If integer arithmetic overflows, the result is an immutable instance of the BigInt class, which is stored as a pointer to an arbitrary-precision integer object. It's depressing how later dynamic languages, particularly scripting languages, haven't managed to have as useful integers. Smalltalk also had a variety of floating point types. It did not have things like if statements in the language. True and False were singleton subclasses of the Boolean class, which implemented methods like ifTrue: and ifFalse:. These took a block (closure) as an argument and either executed it or didn't execute it, depending whether they were True or False.

Re:This really only indicates where jobs are now..

[TheRaven64]

just as no one is seriously going to try to use Javascript in an embedded microprocessor

I draw your attention to JerryScript, developed by Samsung as a lightweight JavaScript interpreter specifically designed for running in embedded microprocessors.