JavaScript Rules But Microsoft Programming Languages Are On the Rise (zdnet.com)

Microsoft languages seem to be hitting the right note with coders across ops, data science, and app development. From a report: JavaScript remains the most popular programming language, but two offerings from Microsoft are steadily gaining, according to developer-focused analyst firm RedMonk's first quarter 2018 ranking. RedMonk's rankings are based on pull requests in GitHub, as well as an approximate count of how many times a language is tagged on developer knowledge-sharing site Stack Overflow. Based on these figures, RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady reckons JavaScript is the most popular language today as it was last year. In fact, nothing has changed in RedMonk's top 10 list with the exception of Apple's Swift rising to join its predecessor, Objective C, in 10th place. The top 10 programming languages in descending order are JavaScript, Java, Python, C#, C++, CSS, Ruby, and C, with Swift and Objective-C in tenth.

TIOBE's top programming language index for March consists of many of the same top 10 languages though in a different order, with Java in top spot, followed by C, C++, Python, C#, Visual Basic .NET, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, and SQL. These and other popularity rankings are meant to help developers see which skills they should be developing. Outside the RedMonk top 10, O'Grady highlights a few notable changes, including an apparent flattening-out in the rapid ascent of Google's back-end system language, Go.

Comments

Using Stack Overflow is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

So the most fucked up and confusing languages will generate the most questions and get labeled as the most popular?

Re:Using Stack Overflow is stupid

[DavidHumus]

Or the language with the most newbies.

BS

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

As a guy who has spent most of his time in Microsoft dev environments, I can tell you the momentum is going in exactly the opposite direction: "how can we dump Microsoft/Oracle/IBM and how fast can we do it" is the current direction of the smart enterprise.

Re:BS

[fred6666]

Of course. Just like you can use Swift for something else than developing for Apple products.
Yet, they are not used outside mother's basements.

Could you name one major piece of software written in C# not specifically made to be executed on Windows? Without a visual studio project file in the source repository?

Re:BS

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Yes, and I've tried it. However, outside of non-trivial applications (and perhaps internal business apps developed with Xamarin), cross-platform support for C#-based apps is pretty poor.

Re:BS

[cheesybagel]

There's nothing wrong with Java in a business environment and elsewhere. The issue is with the way people THINK Java should be programmed, with design patterns, and Hungarian notation. The language itself and the runtime has its warts but it ain't actually THAT bad.

Now for high performance computing I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. Floating point performance in Java sucks and the mandatory garbage collection is another issue. Then again most of the proposed Java replacement have the exact same issues. Go also has a GC for example. Python is great, to write prototypes, but it has even worse performance than Java.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of Unity games use C# and it uses mono to do it. I mean, you could also use it with Visual Studio and in that case you will get a solution and project file, but you don't have to. Unity3D games run on IOS, HTML5, linux and MacOS.

Re:BS

[Kjella]

As a guy who has spent most of his time in Microsoft dev environments, I can tell you the momentum is going in exactly the opposite direction: "how can we dump Microsoft/Oracle/IBM and how fast can we do it" is the current direction of the smart enterprise.

Every enterprise customer thinks what they have is terrible but usually end up switching to a different enterprise vendor and discover that it's equally terrible. Then they try home brew and discover that people develop in ten different languages with a hundred different frameworks and technologies and that Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP, Node.JS and ASP.Net don't mix well and start running consolidation and standardization projects and if you're really unlucky they call in SAP or some other big ERP to gut the whole mess. We still have a solution written in VB6, whatever you pick now expect you'll be stuck with it 10-20 years from now long after the fad is over and it's legacy technology you want to kill with fire.

Re:BS

[angel'o'sphere]

If you have a program handling big amounts of data, in a kind of random fashion, then GC is completely irrelevant.
Malloc and free, or new/delete have the same overhead. And then again you still see people do stuff like:

if (ptr != NULL) {
      delete ptr;
      ptr = NULL;
}

And then come and claim a GC is slower ...

Sorry, from 100 C++ programmers there is probably 1 who can write a program that beats Java's garbage collector.
I rather have 100 Java programmers where 99 don't need to care about memory, and 1 who takes care for the hard cases.

Re:BS

[Prien715]

Here's a couple hundred. ...and that's just games based on the Unity game engine. One game, Hearthstone, has over 10 million players and its client runs on iOS/Android/Windows/macOS.

Re:BS

[fred6666]

Nice try, but

The Unity runtime is written in C/C++. This runtime is used in any build you create using the editor - for webplayers and plugins it is installed separate from your build, whereas it is included in it for stand-alones and other platforms such as iPhone and Wii.

The editor is built on the Unity runtime and additionally includes editor-specific C/C++ binaries.

Wrapped around the Unity core is a layer which allows for .net access to core functionality. This layer is used for user scripting and for most of the editor UI.

So most of the important code is C/C++.
And nothing tells me that API it isn't being developed on Windows using Visual Studio.
The main platform of these games is probably Windows, even though their very first game was developped for Mac OS X.

Re:BS

[fred6666]

I do.
But there is no killer application on Linux requiring mono. Hence, most people don't even bother installing it.
Unlike say, perl and python, which are must-have.
Is there a popular desktop environment, web browser, or even text editor for Linux written in C#? I understand some kid probably wrote a text editor for fun, but I meant something actually used?

Re:BS

[rtb61]

Still just a pretty lame M$ pump piece, how to tell it's a pump piece, the hid what they did not want you to see. Sure they sure they set the order of the most used programs but where is the numbers behind it, you know like percentages. Look if number one is getting say 50% and number 14 is getting 0.5% who cares, what the hell number fourteen is doing when it beats out number 15 who got 0.49 percent. Only one reason to hide the numbers that really counted and only show the B$ meaningless numbers, the real numbers look like shite ie M$ could be doing far worse with real numbers but the others at the bottom are just doing worse than that. Stupidest most meaningless article I have seen it a while, why were the market share numbers missing, they are the only ones that count.

Wrong place to look to plan your career skills

[mykepredko]

While it's always interesting to see what is going in and out of GitHub, I don't feel like it's going to be a good predictor of what you should be focusing on to be highly desirable in the market six months to a year in a future (when you've mastered programming in the language).

If I was coaching somebody looking at what to look at towards the future, I would be recommending (in order of priority) Go, WebAssembly (built from C source) and then Swift will probably be in high demand towards the end of 2018 with few coders skilled in them and there being a need for apps on the Google, Mac and web platforms.

Re:Wrong place to look to plan your career skills

[Dutch Gun]

I'd first ask them what sort of programming career they'd be interested in, and then tailor my recommendations from there. There are many industries which are heavily skewed towards particular languages. Which do you think would be the most important language in the following fields?

* Videogame programming
* Web programming
* Enterprise application programming
* Mobile development
* Scientific and engineering programming

The languages a programmer would want to learn is likely different for each one of these career paths. In the case of my particular career (videogames), you'd be offering terrible advice. C++ completely dominates AAA game development, followed by C#, and a smattering of also-rans.

Programming languages don't exist in a vacuum. They all have strengths and weaknesses, and trying to distill them into a generic popularity contest is a mistake, at least when it comes to career choices.

CSS is a programming language?

[Prien715]

The top 10 programming languages [include]...CSS

That tells you all you need to know about this "study". CSS is a mark-up language -- not a programming language (unless you're on the sadistic side as it is technically Turing complete).

Re:Visual Studio is big in colleges/universities

[Junta]

I recall back in college, a professor said 'ok, we aren't going to use this, but I'm required to give each of you a copy of visual studio, so here you go'.

This is a huge reason to be wary of the various 'corporation wants to "help" teach computing' situation. All those free/extreme discount student licenses? Well the first hit is free.

Re:Visual Studio is big in colleges/universities

[dwpro]

I recall back in college, we developed on sun ultrasparks using feature poor text editors, and spent much time pouring over code for simple typos and parsing core dumps. Now as a professional developer I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to purchase a visual studios license if it weren't provided by work. Much of enterprise software is useless and overpriced-but not visual studios, IMHO.

Re:JavaScript Rules

[superwiz]

Heh heh. Ada sucks. Huh huh.

A gentleman doesn't kiss and tell.

Re:I wish Linux had Visual Studio

[mcl630]

They do... it's called Visual Studio Code for Linux.

Javascript

[NotSoHeavyD3]

JavaScript remains the most popular programming language

-----

Popular as in used because it's the only option, not because people want to use it over pretty much anything else.

Redmonks statistics are horrible

[geoskd]

Redmonks statistical methods and analysis are horribly biased. Can we please stop quoting any conclusions he comes to? They are completely useless at best and actively misleading at worst.

If you want to know what is really going on in the CS world, look to the IEEE; everyone else has an agenda they are pushing...

Re:Still No Jobs for Coders

[geoskd]

I earned a 4.5 GPA (scale of 5) and I have two degrees in computer science

I say this tongue in cheek, but be assured I am serious:

You screwed up your college experience.

School was never about earning the degree directly. Your GPA doesn't mean shit to anybody because everyone knows that thanks to grade inflation, anyone with an IQ above shoe leather can get good grades, all it takes is effort, which all but the laziest of people can do. Unfortunately, Even the most Herculean effort, and the highest GPA doesn't make a good programmer good.

And all of that is completely irrelevant to getting a job. Assuming that you can work well under pressure (Which test taking accurately indicates), the one thing you needed from your college education had absolutely nothing to do with your classes. The whole point of the exercise was to network and meet new people. Those are the very same people that you should look to when you want to find gainful employment.

Not for nothing, but if you actually needed classes in order to learn how to program (Which it sounds like you didn't), you would make a particularly lousy employee. Managers want employees who will learn how to get shit done on their own, because that makes the bosses job 1000x easier. If the boss has to send you for training every time (s)he needs you to take on something outside of your immediate experience, you wont last long.