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

Don't call it a comeback, it's been here for years

[JoeyRox]

C never went anywhere. Its mindshare was just continually eclipsed by whatever bullshit venture-captial-seeking-paradigm-of-the-month was en vogue for that month.

Re:C programs are too dangerous for net-connected

[Travelsonic]

At some point, don't know where that is myself, one needs to look at programming practices as well, and not just the languages being used.

This really only indicates where jobs are now...

[StevenMaurer]

No one is seriously going to try to use C for front end web development, just as no one is seriously going to try to use Javascript in an embedded microprocessor. So what this study is doing is just pointing out where the current jobs are.

Trying to compare languages, is like asking "which is better? a band saw or a screw driver?". They're entirely different. And anyone who doesn't understand that, simply doesn't have enough experience with other programming tools yet.

Re:Oh lord, that again?

[Travelsonic]

You're not suggesting that we make programs less efficient than possible because we have more resources, are you? IMO, while going nuts is not helpful, we shouldn't use resources inefficiently, or the like, "just because" we have the room - not only that, but not every programming project, career, involves software that has that sort of safety - embedded systems, for instance.