The 2018 Top Programming Languages, According To IEEE (ieee.org)

New submitter rfengineer shares a report: Welcome to IEEE Spectrum's fifth annual interactive ranking of the top programming languages. Because no one can peer over the shoulders of every coder out there, anyone attempting to measure the popularity of computer languages must rely on proxy measures of relative popularity. In our case, this means combining metrics from multiple sources to rank 47 languages. But recognizing that different programmers have different needs and domains of interest, we've chosen not to blend all those metrics up into One Ranking to Rule Them All. [...] Python has tightened its grip on the No. 1 spot. Last year it came out on top by just barely beating out C, with Python's score of 100 to C's 99.7. But this year, there's a wider gap between first and second place, with C++ coming in at 98.4 for the No. 2 slot (last year, Java had come third with a score of 99.4, while this year its fallen to 4th place with a score of 97.5). C has fallen to third place, with a score of 98.2.

Comments

Re:Python?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Yeah, no shit .. let's make whitespace significant and other dumb things.

I first saw Python about 15 years ago, and immediately thought "what the hell were the people who designed this shit smoking?"

The quality of the fanboi's I've encountered since has done little to change my mind. I've never understood the appeal other than lazy people can write a bad demo in a few hours.

Re:Rediculuous

[vtcodger]

I actually worked with those old 20000 line plus Fortran programs and they were surprisingly easy to work with. One quickly learned that in order to maintain some semblence of sanity, one had to block line numbers by function -- e.g. 0-1000 are global stuff, 1000-2000 are input ... Sounds dumb, but it worked. In a few cases I saw both the 1960s monolithic Fortran code and the 1980s modern style code with roughly sixteen zillion tiny subroutines. Personally, I think the older style was often easier to work with.

I don't know much about Cobol, but the one time I had to debug an issue in a Cobol subsystem, I found it to be surprisingly readable. I don't think I have the patience to write Cobol code, but I think it probably deserves more respect than it gets.