JavaScript Overtakes Java As Most Popular Programming Language (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Today, HackerRank released the 2019 edition of its annual Developer Skills Report (PDF), surveying over 71,000 software developers from more than 100 countries. Every single industry requires software developers, meaning competition for technical talent is fierce. The idea here is to help everyone from CEOs and executives to hiring managers and recruiters understand the developers they're pursuing. We've put together a quick video to summarize the results. HackerRank asked developers which programming languages they knew and which ones they wanted to learn. Seventy-three percent of developers said they knew JavaScript in 2018, up from 66 percent in 2017. JavaScript was 2018's most well-known language, compared to Java in 2017.

Comments

BS

[110010001000]

There is no way Java was ever #1 in the first place. Give me a break.

Re:BS

[godrik]

Why not, the measure is in "do you know this language?"
Java was the language most chosen in CS1. And bootcamp companies trying to place people in software contracting firm were mostly teaching Java for 15 years. It is not surprising that Java was up there in the "do you know this language?" ranking.

Re:BS

[The Original CDR]

The community colleges did a good job at pumping out as many Java programmers as fast as possible over the years. Now Python is the new Java.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Relax, don't get too worked up by imaginary rankings. Its not like people always tell the "truth".

"Rankings are like assholes, everybody has one."

Re:BS

[110010001000]

So in 2017, Java was the #1 most known language? Sure. Oddly I never meet anyone who has ever been surveyed in these "top N" lists.

Re:BS

[110010001000]

Apparently JavaScript is the new Java.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Statistics isn't in your "Top 10 things I Understand" list, apparently

Re:BS

[110010001000]

Apparently not.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm waitng for PHP Desktop to become the new Java.

Re:BS

[jellomizer]

Being most schools teach their Computer Science classes with Java for about 20 years now, it makes sense that Java has been #1 for a while.

Java is not my favorite language and I really do not like it that much. However as an Application Architect when given a task to design an enterprise level application. I really need to fall back to recommend Java J2EE for its design. For the following reasons.

1. Platform Independence, with .NET you are stuck with a Microsoft Server back end, which isn't horrible, however a Linux servers don't have the big license cost, and can be configured to give far more resources to my App. And if we need Windows servers, it will still work.
2. Developer base, we can always find developers who can code in Java, and if an employee leaves the turn over pain is lessen.
3. General Industry support, Unlike Python or Node.JS where you normally write you web server as part of your program, J2EE works off well supported Application Servers such as Tomcat or Glassfish. Where having to reinvent a lot of communication protocol isn't needed, and we can find Administrators who can deal with such systems.
4. It is easier on your marketing team. Java is the safe bet that will not get you into a holy war.
5. It has most of the modern features implemented. So unlike Node.JS where I hit my head into a wall when I find out it isn't multi-threaded, and I needed the App to ramp up, or needing a driver to connect to the database I don't need to go and install a third party add-in. Making installing and deploying after many years easier.

Now that said, I don't care for coding in Java that much, I actually prefer python myself. However if given a task such as an enterprise solution I will normally fall to Java, or .NET if it is a strictly Windows Shop.

Javascript, being #1 now doesn't surprise me at all. First off Node.JS is becoming rather popular so you are coding your server side in JS. And for nearly all Web Based (and many mobile apps that are web based as well) will use Javascript for the front end, then you have your pick what to do in the back end. It is much like how the more popular political party will loose the election because of a 3rd party candidate. The competition may hurt your overall rankings.

Re:BS

[squiggleslash]

If you want to work in a Fortune 500 company making modifications to the giant collection of back end tools and servers which do everything from push out bills to send reports to management, then you almost certainly will need to know Java just as back in the days of the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum the dominant language wasn't BASIC - even though all your nerd friends knew it - but COBOL.

Java runs almost everything of importance in 2019. The only reason Javascript has caught up is because the web, a mostly unrelated system, has grown up to be larger than all the enterprise software suites put together. (And of course the web is used to access the back-ends, so as it becomes more and more Javascript heavy, it'll increase use in the same places that are heavily Java based too.)

I must admit to being surprised to have to explain this every time the subject comes up. Half of Slashdot thinks that Java is a web plug-in that had poor security and was superseded by Flash. Has nobody here looked for a job yet? You cannot possibly miss the constant streams of job offers from electrical utilities, medical corporations, the large chain stores, telephone companies, and so on, requiring grunt programmers who do Java.

And I haven't even mentioned Android yet.

Small and midsized companies are using PHP, node.js, and whatever the scripting language of the week is, for a huge amount of their work, mixed with .NET on the back-end, but once you get bigger than that nothing else is in the room. Except perhaps some legacy COBOL systems.

Re: BS

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget that java SCRIPT is a SCRIPTING language, you ignorant imbeciles. Cue the rush of morons replying that Verilog is turing complete and rhat someone wrote a compiler for Farsi or Spanish. What a miserable waste of time for a grad school project.

Re:BS

[ripvlan]

no no - those newbie's finally understood that Java is NOT Javascript. And all those who thought they were doing Java moved their checkbox to the correct column.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up you fat retard.

Re:BS

[lgw]

Well put. Java has really gone beyond being the new COBOL (it was that 15-10 years ago) to being what everyone uses for back-end systems. The shift to distributed systems (cloud or otherwise) meant that performance on any given system nearly vanished as a consideration, and C++ along with it in that space. Plus, phones grew powerful enough where you might as well use Java there too. With Microsoft losing its dominance, "Java and C#" has become "Java".

Javascript totally dominates front-end work, so it's no surprise, with the rise of "full stack devs" that it's growing for back-end work as well. I'm quite happy that I'll retire before I'm faced with that.

You cannot possibly miss the constant streams of job offers from electrical utilities, medical corporations, the large chain stores, telephone companies, and so on, requiring grunt programmers who do Java.

Not to mention Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Netflix.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Platform Independence, with .NET you are stuck with a Microsoft Server back end, which isn't horrible, however a Linux servers don't have the big license cost, and can be configured to give far more resources to my App. And if we need Windows servers, it will still work.

Microsoft .NET Core breaks away from the "Windows Only" mold and literally gives us a near-universal runtime where solutions can run on the backend of your choice. And it's all FOSS, including their editor, Visual Studio Code, which many developers have made their de facto JavaScript editor. All this while Oracle is rounding up its corporate customers and fleecing them for even more licensing fees for any Java implementations.

5. It has most of the modern features implemented. So unlike Node.JS where I hit my head into a wall when I find out it isn't multi-threaded, and I needed the App to ramp up, or needing a driver to connect to the database I don't need to go and install a third party add-in. Making installing and deploying after many years easier.

No, node.js isn't multi-threaded. You just need to grok your use of async/await and callbacks to make it multi-threaded. Database interaction is actually quite easy with node.js, and there a certain beauty when you use TypeScript with node.js. It will almost make you think you can have your cake and eat it too.

My biggest problem with Java is all the legacy you have to bring to your project. That, and expect that Oracle won't shit all over you looking for money if your project goes big. If there's one company out there that is more overtly evil than Microsoft or Google, it's Oracle.

Re:BS

[Tablizer]

Microsoft .NET Core breaks away from the "Windows Only" mold and literally gives us a near-universal runtime where solutions can run on the backend of your choice. And it's all FOSS, including their editor, Visual Studio Code, which many developers have made their de facto JavaScript editor. All this while Oracle is rounding up its corporate customers and fleecing them for even more licensing fees for any Java implementations.

Sounds great on paper, but MS often sneaks in tricks and gimmicks that lean you toward Windows without you even knowing it (until it's too late). MS's 30+ year reputation for vendor-lockin shenanigans will be hard for IT shops forget.

Granted, Oracle also has been playing games, jerking around with Java on the legal front, and that's part of the reason for the growth of Python.

Re:BS

[Drethon]

There is no way Java was ever #1 in the first place. Give me a break.

Java was an OK language to learn basics. I always had trouble with any Java library I found did 3/4 of what I needed it to do and I had to dig for another library that also did 3/4 of what I wanted and stitch the two together. Though it has been 10+ years since I did any notable Java programming...

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

CROFL!

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oddly I never meet anyone who has ever been surveyed in these "top N" lists."

Aaaaaand there it is -- the go-to response from any dipshit who doesn't agree with survey results.

Re:BS

[tk77]

Java was an OK language to learn basics. I always had trouble with any Java library I found did 3/4 of what I needed it to do and I had to dig for another library that also did 3/4 of what I wanted and stitch the two together.

The same can apply for just about any programming language.

I've found that Spring, Apache Commons and Hibernate cover most of what I need that isn't worth just writing myself.

Re:BS

[Oswald McWeany]

Apparently JavaScript is the new Java.

It's almost as if it's following a script.

Re:BS

[Oswald McWeany]

The only reason Javascript has caught up is because the web, a mostly unrelated system, has grown up to be larger than all the enterprise software suites put together. (And of course the web is used to access the back-ends, so as it becomes more and more Javascript heavy, it'll increase use in the same places that are heavily Java based too.)

Yeah, and most web developers I know hate javascript and wish something else had become the clientside language of choice... but JavaScript does dominate on the web... ... but, even more than javascript, far more people know "HTML" (if we're including scripting languages, can we also include markup languages)? Almost everyone who knows javascript will know HTML- and even many people who don't do any programming know some HTML.

Re: BS

[DontBeAMoran]

The topic is "programming languages".
You just said "Javascript is a scripting LANGUAGE".

You just lost whatever argument thread you wanted to start.

Re:BS

[DontBeAMoran]

I had to look up "Crying Rolling On the Floor Laughing" because at first I thought it was for "Crapping Right On the Floor Level".

Re:BS

[DontBeAMoran]

Oh, I love Python. Their cheese shop sketch is hilarious.

Re: BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, this guy's trolling post was the most fun one to read in this thread. Show some appreciation.

Re:BS

[Darth]

(if we're including scripting languages, can we also include markup languages)?

no. scripting languages are still programming languages. they are just interpreted on the fly rather than compiled or byte-compiled.

html is a layout language. if you need conditional statements, branching, or to control the flow of logic in any other way, you fall back to javascript precisely because html is not a programming language.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not what the c stands for, don't be a moran.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Hadn't seen that before. Quite funny.

Re:BS

[110010001000]

Aaaaaand we found the guy who believes everything he reads on the Internet.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like, requires a big fat slow VM, is full of idiot "design" decisions, and makes you pay a very heavy price then mostly fails to deliver on the promise? Hm, I can actually see that.

In other news, "hackerrank" is a den of idiots. Mostly desperate Indian bottom feeder "coders" sharing "solutions" in the comments. You can get very high scores just copy/pasting from the next html-tab over. The "platform" such as it is, is also pretty shitty. Codingbat.com does it better, if in fewer languages, and with far less pretense. I gave up on the whole shitty thing. I certainly wouldn't take their numbers to be generally true. Given the amount of fresh graduates on there, it's a bit like trying to measure language popularity on a php forum. Of course you're going to get silly answers. The userbase is fresh cow collitch graduates.

Re:BS

[DontBeAMoran]

Well, that's what I found when looking up "CROFL": Crying.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh sweet summer child

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a little late. It has been a Windows only tech by design for 20 years. Now you can't come and say, hey guys, you can make dot net programming on Linux too, no more Java! That's wrong. It takes a while until you get parity of features on all the platforms. There's no decent IDE, in the first place. You need Windows to run Visual Studio, and no, VSC is not a replacement. At the same time, Java is catching up on modern syntax features, and you don't even need to use Java as your language for the JVM. So the question is: now that we have Java, fully open-source, fully cross-platform, continuously evolving and with a huge community around, why do we need something else?

Re:BS

[Jane Q. Public]

Python has been around for a very long time, and frankly, its popularity is inexplicable.

It doesn't do anything that other languages don't, probably better, its syntax is weird, and it uses "significant white space", which most programmers I know do not like.

Re:BS

[Jane Q. Public]

Java is not "what everyone uses for back-end systems". In fact its a notable minority.

And yes, it is a surprise that JavaScript has been growing for back-end. It's an awful language and it's slow (even with JIT and other compilers).

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget it: "JavaScript is the cancer".

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Please look who's posting before replying!

_,--=#[The Post CRIMER aka The Original CDR doesn't want you to read!!!]#=--,_ 1)Why-are-people-upset-with-him? 2)What-can-I-do 3)What-are-his-names 4)Who-is-FatCashewsLovesMe 5)How-to-defeat-his-hustles 6)Why-are-there-dashes 7)Pastebin-Copy

1)Why-are-people-upset-with-himHe makes frequent low quality posts for two reasons:
Money) BASICALLY: He made thousands of shitty posts & bragged about how much money it made him.
DETAILS: He wants u to folow his referer links & pick up his cookie. Even if u dont buy what he linked but do buy something else from that site later on he often makes money;He ALSO tries to drive TRAFFIC to his various BLOGS & vlogs.
Karma)He believes karma acumulates infinitely So he makes lots of pointles posts that r not bad enough to mod down;hoping they wil get moded up;He was a raging ahole when he thoght he had a karma surplus

2)What-can-I-do DOWNMOD u wil usually get more mod points. If he is postng from a new sock acount w/ krma, get his oldst posts first. DOWNMOD him and AC in fresh thrads early on;Metmods wil reward u. METAMOD his posts. REPLY ONLY ANONYMOUSLY to the most deeply nested coments in his threds it helps hide his posts. Dwnvote his SUBMISSIONS, he uses to get krma. REPORT HIM to slshdot & the afiliate progrms he is usng. DONT MENTION his brand names c**mer.

3)What-are-his-namesMost famous:The Original CDR, Cre|mer Cdre|mer ILoveFatCashews, Anonymous Cashews, The Fat Bastard aka TCDR

4)Who-is-FatCashewsLoveMe AKA Tardu Lardo,FCLM Funny & anoying; Not me or crimer;He keeps lookout for infestation

5)How-can-I-avoid-his-hustles --===DONT FOLLOW HIS LINKS!!!===--
IF YOU MUST:Use a privte tab & nevr buy anything on the same sesion. If he fools u, close tab, cler the cookies for that site. There r sites other than yutube that wil let u watch his videos. I dont know if people view his contnt but I can pictre his jowls jigling at the thoght of people subvrting his business model
6)Why-are-there-dashes & weird stuffI know most only skim thse posts. I want the most imprtnt infrmton to pop out at a glnce & to keep it shrt. I dont use TCDRs name becase he may think tht he benfits from geting it indxed by serch engnes. Id like 2 thnk TCDR & FCLM for editrial advice

7)Copy: http://archive.is/TtDrY

Re:BS

[Shaitan]

Anecdotally I can assure you that javascript is EXTREMELY popular, it is so popular in fact that entire classes of job description simply omit it as an assumed requirement just like the ability to handle a few windows systems is assumed when hiring a Unix guy.

Re:BS

[Rockoon]

Python has been around for a very long time, and frankly, its popularity is inexplicable.

One can conclude that fights between the tab and space crowds might be keeping programmers away from all other languages.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Cdreimer left /. after 20 years and posted 100+ videos in 2018. His trolls are still butthurt that he left them alone with APK.

The thing to do for him: post more videos :)

Re:BS

[Shaitan]

No less inexplicable than java itself but when you are right you are right.

There is essentially nothing Python does better than Perl other than utilize libraries, api's, and tutorials written by people inexplicably being taught python now rather than Perl. Perl is faster when written well, more comprehensive, more flexible, is more internally consistent, and with a style guideline (which can even be automatically applied for you) its easier to read.

My only explanation is that a bunch of ignorant people who thought Perl was dead because Perl 6 never took off and gained their impression of Perl legibility from script kiddies coding CGI are responsible for pushing out Python.

All that aside there is no denying reality and I'm starting to force myself to pull Python out of my bag in place of Perl these days. Despite contributors to cpan doing what they can to fill the holes it is just an uphill battle in this world of cloud tools and apis everywhere when nobody releases a Perl version of anything.

Re:BS

[Shaitan]

Many of them can actually be compiled as well.

Re:BS

[Shaitan]

Interpreted languages are still programming languages. Javascript qualifies with NodeJS. Markup languages aren't for instructing computers at all.

Do things like shell script qualify? Of course not.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

You had to wait 11 days before this user posted another comment. The wait to spam Slashdot with your irrelevant musings must have been really hard.

Re:BS

[mrvan]

Python has been around for a very long time, and frankly, its popularity is inexplicable.

It doesn't do anything that other languages don't, probably better, its syntax is weird, and it uses "significant white space", which most programmers I know do not like.

Not sure if you were serious, but I'll bite.

I've programmed in quite a bunch of languages (in somewhat chronological order, BBC Basic, QBasic, Pascal, Perl, Java, C#, Prolog, C++, Python, R, JS/ES6) and I absolutely prefer python.

The brackets vs whitespace thing is a big red herring. It enforces clean indentation and reduces clutter, which is nice. It makes copy pasting sometimes a bit more difficult, which is annoying. Most of the time, I don't care.

The real benefits of python, imho, are:
- a mostly sane language, good OO and functional support without forcing a paradigm on you,
- a very good standard library and very good external packages for almost everything,
- all the performance you want by dropping a module down to C without the rest of the program noticing.( I don't write a lot of C myself, but I certainly profit from the good folks who wrote parts of the standard library in C and who wrote packages like numpy, spacy, pytorch etc.)
- it's relatively free of gotchas or weird syntax and exceptions, invites a clean coding style, and has a very nice community and documentation.
- I also believe dynamic typing with type hints is actually superior to static typing, as with C++/Java you write so much useless class and interface boilerplate that only distracts.
- I also love the ease of doing things like function pointers, decorators, list/dict expressions and unpacking, generators/iterators, catch-all arguments, etc etc.

Now, all languages are compromises and some languages are better at some of these points, but overall I just love the ease and productivity of working in python.

[So long, Guido, and thanks for all the fish!]

Re: BS

[Anonymous Coward]

PHP is indeed a programming language.

Re: BS

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I hate to rock your paradigm, but PHP Is indeed a programming language.

Re:BS

[angel'o'sphere]

Did it ever occur you that some people simply prefer one language over the other?

I find PERL incomprehensible ...

And you find Python hard to read ...

Re:BS

[angel'o'sphere]

Speed difference between Java and C++ is in the real world quite insignificant.

Only toy programs or very specialized ones are faster in C++ and maintainable etc.

Re:BS

[angel'o'sphere]

In Europe it is ...

And if you count users using the back ends, then yes: Java serves the most. Even if it is Scala or Groovy.

Re: BS

[rtb61]

Java is a clutzy, cumbersome, overly verbose language annoying to use, only gained life through marketing and whole bunch of subroutines you could run from Java libraries, pre done algorithms, that if you had to write from scratch, you would scrap Java, the only thing that kept Java going was the Java libraries. Ruby writes much nicer, far more compact code and is far superior to Java, just lacks the massive libraries of pre-done code, which is not that necessary for Ruby because it is faster to code with, https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ (I put the link in because it was the language I enjoyed the most).

Re: BS

[rtb61]

PS can't resist, for any unemployed journalists, looking to 'learn to code' (heh, heh), Ruby is the language for you, easy to learn, easy to code and quite popular, so unemployed SJW journos, "Learn To Code Ruby" ;D.

Re:BS

[antdude]

I remember Java was added to my undergraduate CS classes (introduction and fundamental) right after I completed them back in 1994 and 1995 when others and I were learning Pascal, C++, C, ASM, etc.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Usually they give you some hint, like a list of js "libraries", or saying "node". So the list of keywords has gotten longer. It's telling, though, how those kids seem to "think" that loading (requiring the visitor's browser to load) another javascript file gives you an entirely different language. O how standards have fallen.

This is inevitable, I suppose, since just like PHP halfies, they just don't know any better. And due to all sorts of "lerne 2 coad" initiatives, there are a lot of them JS kids. So in sheer "popularity", yeah, that contest got well and truly rigged. It doesn't make any of those things a good idea.

I do know how to "handle a few windows systems". I'd toss'em off the building except for those damn greenies. So treating them like toxic hazardous waste it is. ("The greenies or the windows systems?" 'Yes.')

Re: BS

[dromgodis]

the only thing that kept Java going was the Java libraries

Don't underestimate the value of those.

Re:BS

[dromgodis]

Python has been around for a very long time, and frankly, its popularity is inexplicable.

Not really. When it rose to popularity, its only competitor was Perl. People were rather polarized back then (good thing that we all agree nowadays, isn't it?) and to someone who didn't know Perl, it did look like a far worse clusterfsck than JavaScript does today. Python was the clean, thought-through option.

When Ruby appeared, many Pythonistas saw the beauty of it but Python had already built up a considerable community and echo system. Had Ruby appeared earlier, I guess it could have been different.

Now, JavaScript on the other hand. How that came to be the browser language of the world is a complete mystery to me.

It doesn't do anything that other languages don't, probably better

For each specific purpose, you're probably right. But for general purposes, which language would cover them all and be better? You can't really tell unless you define the purposes and the measurement of "better", can you?

its syntax is weird, and it uses "significant white space", which most programmers I know do not like.

If those factors are important to you, fine. But they are perhaps limiting you in your perspective. I have never heard a customer having any interest in the indentation or syntax of the code. However, they are often very interested in robustness, performance, short delivery times, flexibility, and ease of maintenance. Just to be clear: I'm not saying that Python provides any or all of those, but that my opinion of the syntactical language quirks is rather unimportant.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed difference between Java and C++ is in the real world quite insignificant.

Arguably the reason the difference doesn't matter in the real world, is because most of what Java uses is coded in C or C++! Show me a single Java program that's Java all the way down, and doesn't run like utter crap.

Re:BS

[Prien715]

Anything depending on anything approaching real-time responses cannot use Java.

For anything in robotics, it's absolutely useless -- or anything that runs a car, a tractor or a rocket ship. Medical devices are the same. The only game of significance ever written in Java was Minecraft. These aren't niche industries in my mind, The only time you would want to use Java for something is if your life didn't depend on it, in which case it's probably a toy.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

The type of companies and jobs you mention do not appeal to many of us.

"Everything of importance." - to you.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

as with C++/Java you write so much useless class and interface boilerplate that only distracts.

I'd say with java ("kingdom of nouns") much more than with C++. Though C++ is pretty bloated syntax-wise and I mostly gave up on catching up with C++11 and later. My experience is that with a little forethought it's fairly easy to tuck much of the boilerplate under the rug. As in, instead of casting every single time, there's a member that does the casting and whose name describes what it does at a higher level to boot. I pretty much never use stl containers directly, but typedef them (inside a class), and preferrably in such a way that I can replace my thin layer custom container's innards with something else with little effort.

That way C++ still is a bit wordy, but no "kingdom of nouns"-silliness. In other words, I think much of the wordiness is from ill-begotten use. If you then say that C++ is not very robust against idiots, why no, just like C it isn't. java, on the other hand, pretends to have defended against idiots by becoming more woolly and more wordy. It positively reveres boilerplate, witness its way to cook up a "main". The term for that is "complexity smearing". All java buys you with that is SLoC-security.

One of the things I like about C++, and that I miss in java, is that if you run into some obscure snag, there'll be a deeply technical reason somewhere for it to be just like this and not like that. Which is why C++ buffs tend to be language lawyers and The Standard is their bible. Of course, that sort of really deeply obscure technical reason mean the thing itself is convoluted beyond all reason, and that is a problem. In fact I'd use it as a lead to find that supposedly smaller and more elegant language hidden in C++ its bowels, trying to get out. But one thing C++ is not, certainly compared to java, is arbitrary.

Even so, for my own amusement I tend to get back to C these days. (Yes, my ".h" files are C-only compilable.)

Re: BS

[astrofurter]

Dynamic typing is so gross. Try Go (Golang) instead.

Re: BS

[astrofurter]

I'm curious - what languages are commonly used in robotics programming?

Re:BS

[greylion3]

Java was an OK language to learn basics.

Problem is, the first programming language you learn, is what your mind will use as reference to learn other programming languages.

So, your first choice matters. A lot.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

This always struck me as a pop-psychology myth. In my experience, the only programmers who have trouble learning new paradigms are the ones who have been using only a single language for 10-20 years, and are thoroughly entrenched.

The stick-in-the-mud attitude is, "Why should I learn a new tool when I know my hammer REALLY well?"

Re:BS

[Drethon]

This always struck me as a pop-psychology myth. In my experience, the only programmers who have trouble learning new paradigms are the ones who have been using only a single language for 10-20 years, and are thoroughly entrenched.

The stick-in-the-mud attitude is, "Why should I learn a new tool when I know my hammer REALLY well?"

This is my perspective on things. To further misuse the hammer analogy, I look at programming in much the same way, it doesn't matter if it is nails, screws, glue or any other method of putting the pieces together, how you build something starts from the same basics, the specific details are mostly what changes.

Re:BS

[Shaitan]

"I find PERL incomprehensible ...

And you find Python hard to read ..."

Neither is hard to read if you bother to learn the language. Some badly written Perl can be hard to read, some well written Perl can be more legible than Python (which is all basically the same because of enforced whitespace).

If you find Perl incomprehensible you must not have ever really learned Perl. Just like if regular expressions are incomprehensible to you then you've never really learned them. Now try determining an associative array or hash with numeric keys isn't a regular array in Python when the access syntax is identical. Oh wait I meant list vs dictionary since industry standard naming isn't used in Python.

Re:BS

[angel'o'sphere]

I used PERL from roughly 1989 to roughly 1995 ...

I don't use Python much, but it is probably the most easiest read programming language ...

Re:BS

[angel'o'sphere]

That is all nonsense.

Real time only means: you need to be able to react in a predefined maximum time delay to a stimulus. There are plenty of real time systems that are not "hard".

And there are actually Java Real Time VMs ...

There also plenty of games written in Java, e.g. wurmonline ...

And bottom line, that was not the point. The point was speed. C++ is only faster in isolated scenarios, and then you ay the price in development time etc.

Re:BS

[Pseudonym]

It doesn't do anything that other languages don't, probably better, its syntax is weird, and it uses "significant white space", which most programmers I know do not like.

Most programmers that I know don't like significant white space as it has been done in Python, for sure, but most programmers that I know don't know that Python's realisation isn't the only way it can be done. In almost 30 years of using David Turner family languages (of which Haskell is the only one that still exists), I've only ever seen one complaint (made many, many times!) about the indentation rules and it's been fixed.

I'm pretty sure that the supposed productivity improvements of using Python don't exist. You're either doing something extremely simple (which Python is admittedly good at) or you're not counting the time spent testing and debugging as part of the time spent developing.

In a language with a high-quality type system, a large class of bugs don't make it through the compiler. Fixing those bugs doesn't feel productive, but in my experience it takes less time overall than having to find the bugs yourself.

Re:BS

[Pseudonym]

Anything depending on anything approaching real-time responses cannot use Java.

A lot of applications that need low-latency real-time responses cannot use Linux. Or Intel hardware.

Re:BS

[Pseudonym]

Problem is, the first programming language you learn, is what your mind will use as reference to learn other programming languages.

The whole generation brought up on 8-bit interpreted BASIC would strongly disagree with this.

The second most important language that you will learn is language number two, because this is where you will unlearn everything you assumed when using your first. This, I think, is where people who have Python as their first language are at a disadvantage, because Python is like a lot of languages and a lot of languages are like Python, so your chances aren't good. If you don't choose one that's extremely different, the rot will set in early.

The most important language that you will learn is the one you're going to learn next. If you have any sense, it will be as different as possible from all the ones you already know. Choose wisely.

Re:BS

[Shaitan]

You are beating a strawman. I never claimed Python was difficult to read only that well written Perl can surpass it. Python is a perfectly functional and readable language, it's just a solution looking for a problem.

But since you are fishing for complaints, Python has plenty of issues and most of them are just arbitrary and inconsistent design. How about chapter 1, variables.

Remind me again, is this is a list, a tuple, or a dictionary?

ambiguous[1]

Oh right, you can't tell because they use the same braces outside declaration to avoid using as many characters.

What type does this give int(10)/int(3)?

Oh right, they arbitrarily changed the behavior between python versions introducing thousands of bugs should you upgrade.

How many elements does this return?

string[0:1]

Again, we have odd and arbitrary behavior, for some reason the first element specified is inclusive but the second is exclusive.

What does this give 2^4 how about this 2^8?

Not what one would normally expect since Python decided to break conventions on math symbols, again apparently just for the purpose of reducing commonly used characters.

Re:BS

[squiggleslash]

The type of companies and jobs you mention do not appeal to many of us.

Me neither. So what? What does that have to do with Java's dominance?

"Everything of importance." - to you.

To you too. Or do you not have a bank account, electricity to your home, telephone/Internet service, or shop at any major stores?

The only way it's not important "to you" is if you're using a computer you fabbed yourself and you're somehow not connected to the Internet but someone happened to overhear you and typed the comment into Slashdot as a reply to mine. You're part of Western Civilization? Congratulations! Everything of importance runs Java.

Re:BS

[angel'o'sphere]

PERL has also its problems.

Why do I put things into an associative array using @x{y} = z but retrieve it with $x{y}?

There are plenty of others. PERL is the only language where after finishing writing the program I still have bugs inside.

The way how you use subroutines and their arguments is simply absurd ...

I don't do much with Python ... but I like it over PERL :D

What does this give 2^4 how about this 2^8?
I actually don't know, but in both cases most likely a double ...

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Aww I think you're just a jealous douche making 50K in Silicon Valley

Re:BS

[Hadlock]

Ruby is probably a good language, but the fact that there are 19 different ways to do each thing, plus the mess of magic that is rails, makes Ruby on Rails projects often almost unmaintainable and you spend a lot of time hunting down bugs due to unintended behaviors... Ruby is probably a good language, but a lot of people look at ruby projects as one step above projects written in php... not advisable for long term production use, and/or written by hacks.

Re:BS

[Baki]

From 1999 till 2017 I've worked in environments that were almost 100% java (large banks in europe). Now I work in a more industrial environment, and its all c++ and python here. It really depends on your context. You should not think your personal perspective tells the whole story.

Makes sense to me

[SuperKendall]

I'm surprised Java has held on this long, but there is a ton of enterprise Java development still out there... it seems like in recent years stuff like node.js has really started to take over server development, and Javascript is slowly spreading to other realms as well.

It's funny how languages that are never favorites of the purists seem to always end up at the top...

Re:Makes sense to me

[110010001000]

Yeah, it is "funny" as in "very suspicious" because it doesn't reflect reality.

Re:Makes sense to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Javascript is slowly spreading to other realms

like cancer

Re:Makes sense to me

[bobbied]

The demise of Java has been writing on the wall since Oracle acquired Sun and didn't open source it. You just KNEW that once Oracle blew through all the profit from Sun hardware they had optimized their product for, they'd be back at the well to monetize Java. Recently that's exactly what they've done by starting to charge for their flagship Java environment.

I expect the further fragmentation of the Java world (and the eventual death of Oracle too) because of this. Oracle will kill java and then the family name by eating it's children.

Re:Makes sense to me

[ClickOnThis]

it seems like in recent years stuff like node.js has really started to take over server development, and Javascript is slowly spreading to other realms as well.

Like what? [I'm sincerely curious.]

Also I find it perverse that node.js is taking over server development. Really? At what scale? [Again, sincerely curious.]

Re:Makes sense to me

[Jason Levine]

I wonder if Android app development boosted Java's numbers. I was looking into developing some apps for Android, but it requires Java. I haven't programmed Java in decades so I'd need to first get up to speed on Java before getting into Android application development.

Re:Makes sense to me

[jellomizer]

Your favorite or best language rarely ever makes it to the top of the list. For the primary reason that your favorite is often most closely connected to how you want to work, which is suggestive.
The winning languages tend to be mediocre but doesn't completely suck. If you have to code with other developers the choice of language is a compromise with the other developers on your team. So no one gets what they want but they get with what they live with.

Re:Makes sense to me

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no idea what you're talking about. Oracle JDK is built on OpenJDK. (Oracle JDK adds bits like JavaFX and a couple of other minor things.) OpenJDK is still free as in beer. Oracle JDK is what costs money for enterprise support contracts.

TL;DR version: OpenJDK *is* Java and is still free.

Re:Makes sense to me

[cordovaCon83]

IMHO, Java should be a last choice for Android application development. Few clients really mean that they want an Android-only application where there are other SDK's that provide us ways to develop for multiple platforms at once. You might still have to get under the hood and write a little of Java once the final project is built. I'm personally interested in Xamarin, but that SDK plays to my strengths. Then there's Cordova and React Native, if your strength is in javascript languages. There are other options too, which maybe others would like to discuss. Perhaps you are right, Android has been artificially inflating those numbers a bit while other languages have been racing to join the Android space.

Re:Makes sense to me

[StormReaver]

The demise of Java has been writing on the wall since Oracle acquired Sun and didn't open source it.

Who didn't open source what? Sun open sourced Java BEFORE Oracle bought the whole kit and kaboodle. The rumors of Java's demise have been nonsensical ridiculousness. I hate Oracle as much as anyone else, but I don't have any complaints about its stewardship of Java. If Oracle does too bad a job, there are other companies fully able to pick up the ball and run with it. And with nothing more than a name change, there is nothing that Oracle can do about it.

Recently that's exactly what they've done by starting to charge for their flagship Java environment.

Oracle is charging its commercial customers more, but the rest of the world continues on like nothing is happening. Also, OpenJDK (which is now identical to Oracle's JDK) will always remain free from the Oracle licensing machine.

Java's future is still bright.

Re:Makes sense to me

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate Oracle as much as anyone else, but I don't have any complaints about its stewardship of Java

Really? What about their API lawsuit against Google? IMO, if the court allows Oracle to copyright an API, then the entire software industry will be in jeopardy (at least in the US).

Re:Makes sense to me

[UnknownSoldier]

/sarcasm Shit languages (Java, Javascript, PHP) are popular because any code monkey can throw something together? No kidding! News at 10. Film at 11.

Ignoring memory management doesn't make it go away.

--
Murphy's Computer Laws
Meskimen's Law
"There is never time to do it right but there is always time to do it over."

Re:Makes sense to me

[Anonymous Coward]

The downside of things like Xamarin or React is that they come with a lot of cruft attached. Your users will experience a slower and fatter application, which may or may not work well cross-platform.

Android development is easy, you don't have to be a master in Java development to create something. I would recommend using plain Android Studio for the moment, even if Java (and Kotlin) is an ugly language.

Re:Makes sense to me

[Anonymous Coward]

No one browses at 0 anymore.

Re:Makes sense to me

[squiggleslash]

it seems like in recent years stuff like node.js has really started to take over server development,

From Java? No. Doesn't tick any of the boxes that made Java the major Enterprise language and Java has never been particularly popular outside of enterprise work for back-ends. The other major use of Java would be in Android development, and node.js isn't really a thing there (and wouldn't need to be given you can easily embed the web browser engine in your app and pass it objects it needs anyway.)

From PHP? I wish... I hope! Has anyone rewritten Wordpress and Drupal in node.js yet? That'd be fantastic.

Re:Makes sense to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Merrium Webster

1a : turned away from what is right or good : corrupt
b : improper, incorrect
c : contrary to the evidence or the direction of the judge on a point of law perverse verdict
2a : obstinate in opposing what is right, reasonable, or accepted : wrongheaded
b : arising from or indicative of stubbornness or obstinacy
3 : marked by peevishness or petulance : cranky
4 : marked by perversion

Apparently his mind went to definition number one or two (most commonly used) and yours for some reason leapt into the category of pervert (least commonly used).

Why would that be?

Re:Makes sense to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Until recently, there was no other language beside Java which made multi-threading easy. It also comes with it's own GUI, something nearly all other languages lack. The Java APIs are very mature and extensive.

Re:Makes sense to me

[serviscope_minor]

From Java? No. Doesn't tick any of the boxes that made Java the major Enterprise language

Indeed, consider for example this comparison:

Has factory factories: [X] Java [ ] Node.js
Has factory factory factories: [X] Java [ ] Node.js
Has final property object factory factory observer delegate: [X] Java [ ] Node.js

None of the boxes at all.

Re:Makes sense to me

[Anonymous Coward]

It's free as in "we'll sue you if you try to re-implement the APIs".
The OpenJDK runtime is free. The language specification is proprietary, encumbered all kinds of legal nonsense, and is a total disaster in general.

Re:Makes sense to me

[HornWumpus]

Including Oracle.

Ellison stole SQL from IBM, his former employer.

Re:Makes sense to me

[angel'o'sphere]

I haven't programmed Java in decades so I'd need to first get up to speed on Java before getting into Android application development.
No you haven't. Java is piss easy, that is why everyone uses it. You have to dig into the Android APIs ... so rather start sooner with your app idea than later.

Re:Makes sense to me

[Anonymous Coward]

If Oracle does too bad a job, there are other companies fully able to pick up the ball and run with it. And with nothing more than a name change, there is nothing that Oracle can do about it.

Given Oracle v. Google, that's a rather extraordinary claim. Oracle has clearly demonstrated that not only are they ready and willing to fight anyone who tries to use the Java language in a way they don't approve of, but they will happily burn society to the ground if it will get them their pound of flesh. Personally, I think you'd have to be off your rocker to make Java part of your business plan these days.

Re:Makes sense to me

[Pseudonym]

Also I find it perverse that node.js is taking over server development. Really? At what scale? [Again, sincerely curious.]

Anyone who has used node.js knows full well that it scales to one CPU and one CPU only.

OK, yes, it uses C++ threads for asynchronous I/O. But you can't run JS code on more than one CPU. Node.JS is essentially what happens if you take Erlang/OTP and make it less useful.

Now that's just sad....

[bobbied]

Java Script is more popular than Java?

No! It's not true! It can't be true!

Search your feelings... You KNOW it's true....

Re:Now that's just sad....

[Errol backfiring]

More used is not more popular. As someone on Slashdot once said: JavaScript is as elegant as an oil tanker. Still, if you want to program a web site, you probably won't get around it.

Re:Now that's just sad....

[Jeremi]

I searched my feelings, and they are decidedly mixed:

"Great, finally the Grand Verbose Mediocrity that is Java is getting pushed aside by something more modern and eleg---wait, no, ah crap, it's JavaScript"

Re:Now that's just sad....

[Anonymous Coward]

What metric would you use to measure most popular if not by use?

Good

[XxtraLarGe]

I loathe Java only slightly less than I loathe Visual Basic. I just wish they hadn't changed the name from LiveScript to JavaScript for marketing purposes. Like any programming language, it has it's good points and bad points, but IMHO, it's the best language for learning programming fundamentals. All you need is a browser & a text editor.

Re:Good

[110010001000]

JavaScript is the best language for learning? Christ.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

No, javascript is the worst programming language to ever plague this sad planet.

Just because it runs in the browser does not make it good.

Re:Good

[jlowery]

I spent over a decade developing in Java, from v1.18 to v6+. The last project was a large Spring app for digital inventory.

Java was never a good choice for web development, and the evidence of that was: J2EE + frameworks. J2EE was unmanageable without a framework, and the frameworks themselves were huge and burdensome. And compilation...bleh!

JavaScript is quick and light for whipping up a web application. It's drawback is the lack of static types, but there is TypeScript if you want it (not perfect, but maybe useful). The other drawback is specific to npm: each module contains its own dependencies. That is both good and bad: good, in that you don't have version conflicts; bad in that there are so many libraries there's no hope you can verify the security of your site, especially for less popular modules.

Re:Good

[XxtraLarGe]

JavaScript is the best language for learning?

Yes. To get up and running with learning the basics, it is, especially since it's syntax is very similar to many other programming languages, like C and C++. That's the biggest reason I'd choose that as a learning language over Python. You can learn conditional logic, loops, arrays, strings, variable scope, functions, order of precedence, etc., without having to worry about learning strong variable typing, memory allocation, pointers or advanced data structures. Those subjects are all important, but they're just not necessary to learn the basics.

Re:Good

[jellomizer]

I wouldn't call it a good learning language. But it doesn't require additional tools to be installed.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite language is C++.

I realize that makes me a freak. I don't care. It gives me the low-level control that I want with the option (but not the requirement) for object oriented design when it seems to fit the problem space well.

So, I like it.

Re:Good

[91degrees]

It is extremely accessible.

It's the closest thing we have to the various flavours of BASIC we had installed in the 8-bit era.

Not sure if that really compensates for its shortcomings. Not sure if learning BASIC was actually that good, to be honest.

Re:Good

[Opportunist]

Well, it's the best language for learning a few swears you didn't think you had inside you.

Re:Good

[Opportunist]

No. Effin' no. The callback concept of Javascript is alien to pretty much ANY other language on the planet.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

JavaScript sucks...TypeScript makes it very tolerable.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm? The callback concept isn't alien, even if the Javascript syntax is.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Could not agree more.. It's one of the worst languages with so many weird behaviors, causing issues all over... And spotting one of those things from just reading the code is next to impossible.
Next is performance, because it's quite expensive to run things on amazon/azure.. it's just a joke....

Sure in javascript you can get something up and running fairly quickly, but to get it production-ready is whole other story... Unless you hire good developers that *really* know javascript, but that is almost harder than finding good c/c++/go/java developers.

I produce, stable, code faster writing it in C, and i'm not saying it's fast to write C code...

Javascript is a toy-language made for, and by, people (not all, but most) thinking they know how to code. npm repo's are a joke and littered with security issues and bugs.. Just have a look at how good testing they do on npm that is supposed to be the spider in the web managing dependencies.. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/7zdoq3/warning_sudo_npm_will_chown/
How much would it cost for your company if all developers would have to spend 5 hours to reinstall their systems.... Not to mention build-servers, test-servers and probably production-servers.

Just burn it... throw it in a volcano and hope it dies.. But it will definitely not be a virgin sacrifice since it's fucked over so many people in it's lifetime.

Capta: bluntest :D

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for npm and a shitload of global npm installs that bypasses the normal package-manager..

Re:Good

[110010001000]

It is extremely accessible..

So is meth.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Well argued.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when do you need npm or any other package manager to learn JavaScript? For that matter, what 'normal' package matter?

Re:Good

[jellomizer]

This is one aspect of "Modern Languages" which I hate.
npm, cargo, pip...
These package managers for additional libraries are really a step back. I like to avoid 3rd party libraries as much as possible, because they become a weak part in the long term support of your application.

When developing, especially if the language is new to you, trying different variants to see which library works best for you means you may have 2 or 3 libraries that do the same thing installed, and if you are not doing proper documentation, you may forget which ones you need to run when deploying.
Secondly some of these are not long term supported, so after a couple of years, you have to use a different libary and need to re-code portions of your application.

I much rather have a language with a large default set of libraries that covers most of the tasks at hand. Database connections, file i/o, secure ftp, ssh, https...
then trying to hunt and peck and find 3 ssh libraries, where 2 of them just doesn't jive to my way of thinking about it, and the 3rd one hasn't been touched in 2 years.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember seeing a website that showed what chronic exposure to JavaScript did to your body. Can't remember the name though.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I loathe Java only slightly less than I loathe Visual Basic

You have to be kidding.

Visual Basic is a disaster for teaching people to program well.

Is it good for anything?

If you just want to kludge together things, sure. Hack some really bad code, yes. Create a maintenance nightmare for future generations, without a doubt (arguably as bad as Perl, and that's saying a lot). Cost your employer lots of future revenue, assuredly.

All things we don't want people doing - and VB encourages these things.

Good programming requires management of complexity, designing usable interfaces, and writing maintainable code. It's about building the right habits - habits of care that create awareness of what it means to be professional, to do good work, and to take pride in one's work - early on in the learning process.

Java can be used to help people do that just fine, with the right teacher (usually that means somebody who isn't part of the publish-or-perish system, since conflict of interest does not good teachers make).

Java is not a terrible language, and most competent professionals who know VB or JavaScript would far rather be programming in Java. It's easy to work around the limitations of Java, far more so than those other two languages. And if it's not as clean and verbose as Ruby or Python, well, it's not a perfect world.

Knowledge of a programming language does not make that language the most popular. Many people "know" fast food, that doesn't mean they choose to eat it given better opportunities. Languages like JavaScript and VisualBasic are the computing world's equivalent of fast food.

Re:Good

[dromgodis]

So very much this! Well evolved, tested, tried, fixed, documented, supported go-to libraries with a developed community and user base. The path to good sleep at night.

I too prefer that to having my application break because I used some random developer's left-padding component that I found in a repository.

Java is really not bad in this light. Remember, it is the tractor that pulls the race car out from the bushes when it has slid off the track.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

var snark=function(o,c){
  c(null,'Welcome to the future');
};

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

JavaScript is cancerous to the mind of the beginner programmer. They end up learning "you just do it this way and it works usually even thought you get weird errors in the console" oriented development. Cargo culting, magic, ignorant functionality. NPM has made an art of the quaint copy/paste from stack overflow method of rookie design. At least when you do that as a junior, you feel guilty about it.

JavaScript is easy, but it's the high fructose corn syrup of languages.

Two things I learned today

[110010001000]

Two things I learned today:

JavaScript is the #1 most known language on the planet. https://venturebeat.com/2019/0...
"Black Panther" is the best movie of all time according to Rotten Tomatoes https://www.rottentomatoes.com...

It is amazing what you can learn on the Internet.

Re:Two things I learned today

[Jzanu]

Ignoring your attempt at snark, isn't it possible that both of those claims are true? Even beyond that, metrics are designed to measure things. In this case knowledge/awareness+experience with a programming language for Java, and success in box office ticket sales globally as well as satisfaction by actual viewers aggregated as marketing blocks. Those are the things that each deems valuable, and in their contexts are what is valuable.

Re: Two things I learned today

[Anonymous Coward]

JS and Black Panther are like drugs and alcohol. A short high and then a hangover. Best to stay away.

Re:Two things I learned today

[Anonymous Coward]

"Black Panther" is the best movie of all time according to Rotten Tomatoes

Why does this upset you so much? You keep bringing it up, without saying why. I have my guesses and none of them are very nice.

Re:Two things I learned today

[110010001000]

Let me guess: you are a SJW and you are upset because I dare to question why on the "BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME", the out of the top 10 films there are Black Panther (#1), Lady Bird (#3), Get Out (#5), BlackKKlansman (#6), Mad Max: Fury Road (#7). My point is that anyone online poll/rating is GAMED by those with an agenda, whether it be social, political or financial. Do you see a theme of the movies? It is the same thing with these "top languages" polls. There are whatever the person selling the report wants the answer to be. It doesn't reflect any sort of reality and it is 100% dishonest. That is why it upsets me so much. So take your "guesses" and shove it.

Re:Two things I learned today

[Anonymous Coward]

The un-ironic use of the term SJW instantly invalidates all of your opinions. (Just an FYI if you ever wonder why people avoid social contact with you)

But anyway, wow, what a snowflake you are.

So easily baited.

Re:Two things I learned today

[Anonymous Coward]

The un-ironic use of the term SJW instantly invalidates all of your opinions.

Why, exactly?

I don't have a dog in this horse race, and don't use the term myself, but I can't help thinking that being dismissive of your opponent's attitude doesn't actually refute a goddamn thing.

Re:Two things I learned today

[110010001000]

Sorry sunshine. I'll rephrase:

Let me guess: you are a snowflake and you are upset because I dare to question why on the "BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME", the out of the top 10 films there are Black Panther (#1), Lady Bird (#3), Get Out (#5), BlackKKlansman (#6), Mad Max: Fury Road (#7). My point is that anyone online poll/rating is GAMED by those with an agenda, whether it be social, political or financial. Do you see a theme of the movies? It is the same thing with these "top languages" polls. There are whatever the person selling the report wants the answer to be. It doesn't reflect any sort of reality and it is 100% dishonest. That is why it upsets me so much. So take your "guesses" and shove it.

Re:Two things I learned today

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm upset that you can't read the headline of the page where it says "BEST MOVIES OF 2018".

Re: Two things I learned today

[Anonymous Coward]

When someone asks why does it bother you, and your fangs come out with SJW this and SJW that, you look like the snowflake.

Re: Two things I learned today

[Anonymous Coward]

There you go, itâ(TM)s the liberal javascript agenda gaming another meaningless list of things on the Internet, please lead with that next time so we can save time skipping everything else you write.

Re:Two things I learned today

[Anonymous Coward]

Rotten Tomatoes, like most web forums, is inherently and powerfully biased to favour new films over old.

If you really believe 7 out of the 10 greatest films OF ALL TIME were all made within the last 4 years, I can only doubt (1) your taste or (2) your knowledge. The fact is that a lot of votes on such sites are cast by teenagers (or younger) who've simply never seen enough different movies to be remotely qualified to judge that.

Yuck

[DarkRookie2]

JS was the reason I never did get into webdev besides some minor pages that just use CSS and HTML.

Re: Yuck

[Anonymous Coward]

It is true and JavaScript just happens to render in most browser but it is impossible to know how often and where it is rendered correctly. Other than dancing cats and Ajax calls that seem to work it is a very bad la gauge for anything serious

Re: Yuck

[Anonymous Coward]

It is true and JavaScript just happens to render in most browser but it is impossible to know how often and where it is rendered correctly. Other than dancing cats and Ajax calls that seem to work it is a very bad la gauge for anything serious

no, it's just you, you're a loser. the rest of us are making our living doing what you think is impossible

Take aways

[Anonymous Coward]

News from the survey

#1 Botique languages are less well known than Perl and include Go, Kotlin, Clojure, Rust and Erlang
#2 Survey does not ask, what languages did you use on a large project? A more important measure of languages to know.
#3 Learn Python and TypeScript
#4 Learn Angular, React, ASP.net, .NET Core and maybe React for getting a job
#5 Negatives at work transcending tech: too many interruptions (pings slack, hipchat, meeting invites), estimates treated as deadlines, everything is top priority
#6 Senior developers want more money, junior developers want technology skill advancement

Like the use of 'purists' when describing programming language preference. Fits well.

C# purists in charge of the language are turning it into a a mess of thousands of cute features for language lawyers. (the maze of twisty passages all alike language)

Learn languages and frameworks for which you can actually get a job today.

dot Net, or Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's so horrible of paying a reasonable fee, for a large, debugged, well documented library? Or, a good compiler, to catch all sorts of weird typos, and mistakes? Or, paying for a good virtual machine, which can target many architectures?

Microsoft, and Sun, both made big ecosystems for managed code. Either one should do a decent job, and save their adopters lots of trouble.

Or, is there fear Oracle well eventually screw its adoptees of Java, like they currently do to their database customers?

Re:dot Net, or Java?

[HornWumpus]

You lay down with Oracle, you wake up with software audits (and fleas).

Re: dot Net, or Java?

[edris90]

Because if you are dependent upon code you don't control, or understand fully, whoever does control the code has leverage over you. and may choose to apply that leverage in the future for economic Advantage

All the cool kids

[cordovaCon83]

All the cool kids refer to JavaScript as ECMAscript these days. If you're lucky, they'll even write you some code that doesn't break in older browsers. Buy a MacBook Pro and some horn-rimmed glasses already, old man!

Re:All the cool kids

[Anonymous Coward]

Only security insensitive idiots that like to run privileged code over the internet through ActiveX use old browsers anyway.

Re:All the cool kids

[cordovaCon83]

They say the customer is always right. If a sales rep tells me that their client can't pull up a web page that they need, I'm not allowed to tell the client that they need to buy a new computer already or alternatively not do business with us any more because I coded something their browser doesn't support. For example, there are DoD contractors out there that have to follow the "Army Gold Standard", which means your code needs to run in older browsers, and good luck getting the Army to update that thing - it literally may take an act of Congress. There are many more examples of customers running older browsers on older machines that don't quite support the coolest bleeding edge features of ES6+. The reality of business sometimes conflicts with the wishes of the developer to write bleeding edge stuff. We are not allowed to tell the client that they're stupid for running outdated software and they need to stop being cheap just so they can order one copy My Widget(TM). At best, we write code that plans for the cutting edge to be fully adopted and we also write legacy support fallback stuff.

I feel so old and outdated!

[DidgetMaster]

As I continue to develop my new data management system in that archaic language C++. I am one of those Luddites who believes that 'scripts' are for doing once-in-a-while tasks that need to be written quickly or updated often. Real programs are written in Assembly or the next best thing...C or C++. Of course, all the young programmers can't believe the demo when my system can do something in half a second that usually takes 10 times longer using something else.

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[dbrueck]

Hey, if it's working for you, that's great.

But yes, you are outdated. I don't mean that in an offensive way at all, but your views on things such as "scripts" vs "real programs" are many, many years out of date (and objectively wrong). Technology has advanced, tools have improved, the state of the art has matured.

There's more opportunity than any of us can get to, so we each have to find a niche to play in, and if you've found yours, then more power to you. But I can't help but wonder if you might not have as good an understanding of the state of things as you think..

(this is coming from someone who once was "sure" that I'd never make the jump to C because there was just no way I was going to give up the performance and control of assembly)

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[ath1901]

I think most of the flame war between different language proponents really comes down to different use cases.

If you're mostly doing web stuff then security and uh... web-stuff... is your main concern. The bare metal languages like C/C++ must seem like nuclear power plants run by squirrels, powerful but a disaster waiting to happen.

If you're doing any kind of number crunching or large scale data management, then things are different. Often, the user is trusted to handle the data so security is not an issue for my application. Presentation (web-stuff, reports etc) is also less relevant since it can often be outsourced to someone dumber / less expensive. But, controlling exactly when and how things are computed, converted or moved around in memory is often essential.

I guess most people only have experience from one type of job and extrapolate from their experience. For example, I dislike Java/C# just because they have never been the right tools for my kind of jobs. But, I know people use them so they must be good for something. I just don't know what.

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with your philosophy and have for years, I write quite a lot in perl now, and simply use Inline::C for those parts that need to be super fast and don't change much. Quite a lot of what I do doesn't have to run fast, but wouldn't even exist if I couldn't write and debug it very quickly. Once the serious number munching is figured out, sure, I go to C for that. I tend to save C++ for things that are actually a good map to an object, like say a driver for some little oddball sensor on a uP - it really shines for that. Trying to make everything fit into an object oriented model...that's just dumb IMO. And I know it's only my own opinion, but really, needing an object for hello world in Java? Surely they jest.

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[MaryannG]

"C/C++ must seem like nuclear power plants run by squirrels". Thank you for my daily chortle. :D

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[ljw1004]

As I continue to develop my new data management system in that archaic language C++. I am one of those Luddites who believes that 'scripts' are for doing once-in-a-while tasks that need to be written quickly or updated often. Real programs are written in Assembly or the next best thing...C or C++.

Continue to develop? Hey, maybe if you'd used Python or Java then you'd have finished your development already!

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[Anonymous Coward]

When you code in assembly, which cpu do you tailor your system for?

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[DidgetMaster]

The assembly bit was just a joke. Although I did a bunch of assembly programming in the 80s, I only use that knowledge now when I am debugging and sometimes stepping through some disassembly code.

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[DidgetMaster]

Sure. It might be 'done', but it would probably run much slower than it does now. Since speed is one of my key selling points, that would not be good.

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[DidgetMaster]

Yes, C/C++ does give you plenty of rope to hang yourself, so you have to be more careful than with some other 'managed' code. But like the nuclear power plant example, if you want good, optimal base-line power then it can be a good choice. I guess some of the other scripting languages are like wind or solar power...really cool technology but leaves you wondering why your stuff won't work after dark or when the wind doesn't blow.

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[DidgetMaster]

My comment was meant to be a bit 'tongue and cheek'. I was not offended at all by your comment. I have played with a number of languages over the years (Assembly, C, C++, Java, C#, Pascal, Lua, Python, Modula-2) but for me, I have always gravitated back to C++ because I enjoy low-level data management programming (file systems, databases, etc.) I don't mind that others go for the new fangled web technologies. More power to them. It just is not for me.

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[Anonymous Coward]

Heheh, props for using perl. I didn't know anyone was using it anymore.

needing an object for hello world in Java?

Nah, you don't need an object. You need a class, sure, but you don't need to instantiate it.

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[Anonymous Coward]

So then you benchmark and optimize the slowest parts. Really, it's 2019. People should know this stuff already. If you are developing this for a company, rather than as a personal project, then the cost of the extra time spent debugging and maintaining your full C++ system likely far exceeds the potential speed benefits of developing everything in C++. In addition, system and algorithm design matters far, far more than the language choice. Spend all the time you saved using a more efficient-to-code language on improving the design and you can end up with a faster system.

These types of things are researched. You can go read the studies and scientific, industry studies on this type of stuff instead of guessing or thinking about it on your own.

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[Tablizer]

all the young programmers can't believe the demo when my system can do something in half a second that usually takes 10 times longer using something else.

Do you mean development time or run time? I'll assume you mean runtime. In certain domains raw execution speed matters, such as video display drivers, but not in most I know. The bottleneck is often inter-layer communication, such as DB-to-app, app-to-network, etc. You may argue we don't need lawyers, I mean layers, but that's a different topic.

There's usually multiple factors in weighing tool-sets, and app speed shouldn't be the overriding factor most of the time. Don't heavily focus on a single factor above others unless it's actually important in the domain.

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[dromgodis]

I agree in general, though as usual "it depends".

Polyglocy also has its costs. Wrapping C++ code to be able to use it from Python is a non-zero cost in effort and maintenance, and so is mastery of several languages and frameworks. That cost should be taken into account and it may or may not sway the balance.

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[Anonymous Coward]

(and objectively wrong).

So, needing a separate desktop just so you can run "slack" is "objectively right"?

I think that this cavalier attitude is a large part of what makes the state of software so crappy. For example, many people Just Don't Update. And why should they, for that invisible "security" threat? When half the time even if you're fully updated your systems will still turn out to have sometimes decades-old vulnerabilities? Updates take too much time and make computers slower, so no thanks.

What's good for the developer's manager's beancounter's bottom line, isn't so good for the users, and the clients, and so on.

Re:I feel so old and outdated!

[Anonymous Coward]

You should gravitate to Java or C# based on your description. It does not look like your domain excludes garbage collected languages.

Java Should be #1

[Anonymous Coward]

Java should be #1, all you need to create a simple "hello world" program are:

-a few hundred GB of disk space, for helper libraries, different versions of the interpreter, and libraries
-a few GB of ram, typically just 16GB will do!
-a few cores, of at least 2-3Ghz, as few as four will do!

-a little bit of patience, "hello world" compiles in as little as 5 mins with the above configuration, but gets faster every iteration, thanks to the virtual machine and learning.

I don't see why "light weight" languages like JavaScript as winning, either go big, or go home, thats the Java way.

Re:Java Should be #1

[CapS]

@Controller
class ThisWillActuallyRun {
      @RequestMapping("/")
      @ResponseBody
      String home() {
      "Hello World!"
      }
}

https://twitter.com/rob_winch/...

Re: Java Should be #1

[Anonymous Coward]

This is simply not true.
Java hello world program in 2019 equals one native binary with tiny memory footprint. No need for VM or any runtime environment.
I guess you haven't been in the know for some time.

What kind of nightmare world is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

How did we get here? What went wrong?

Re:What kind of nightmare world is this?

[irrational_design]

I blame google. They have a huge browser market share. If they had introduced a second Chrome programming language that could be used instead of JavaScript then all of the other browser makers probably would've been forced to adopt it as well.

Re:What kind of nightmare world is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is silently killing Java

Every new enterprisey thing is supposed to run on containers. The #1 container management platform you will find today in every public and private cloud out there is Kubernetes. Its (very) distant competitor is Docker Swarm.

Kubernetes is written in Golang (interestingly its started its life in Java). Docker Swarm is written in Golang. That means anyone who deploys enterprisey containers will have to manage a Golang ecosystem. Already, big mature recognized Java apps like elasticsearch are gaining Golang extensions (beats). Give it a few years, and if Google does not make a huge mistake with Golang, PHBs will start to ask "if we have to employ Golang devs, and all the new shiny stuff is in Golang, do we really want to continue investing in Java for new projects"?

Add to that that as soon Golang is mature enough, Google has an interest in moving the android ecosystem to it, just to get rid of the Oracle Java sueballs

Return to Functional Programming?

[Drethon]

OK, feel free to ridicule me on everything I'm getting wrong as I'm a C#/C++/Fortran developer, the only JavaScript I've done is enough for the front end of a simple web game a few years back...

What I know with JavaScript is you have a lot of different ways to use the language, but it was meant to be to C what Java is to C++ but for web development. Or provide something like C's function oriented style that looks more like Java.

So does this mean we are reverting (progressing? subsiding? meh...) back to functional programming? Whatever gets the job done I suppose, as long as people understand what the job is.

Re:Return to Functional Programming?

[Anonymous Coward]

> So does this mean we are reverting (progressing? subsiding? meh...) back to functional programming? Whatever gets the job done I suppose, as long as people understand what the job is.

Yes. Functional programming is big in the JS world, as well as growing in popularity with the rise of languages like Scala (my personal favorite).

Re:Return to Functional Programming?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no choice but use JS as a functional language since it has no real OO features so the only way to make up for a horrible global namespace it is to try to encapsulate everything in functions.

Re:Return to Functional Programming?

[Tony Isaac]

"Back" to functional programming?

Functional programming was never big, historically. Javascript, while not a purely functional language, is more widely used as a functional language than any other language in history. No other functional language has "made it big," beyond a few radical believers.

Remember XSLT? That's probably the number 2 most widely used functional language.

Before that, there was only the RPN calculator. Everything else was procedural.

That also is in decline

[SuperKendall]

I'm sure Android development pushed Java numbers up quite a bit. With Google transitioning that to Kotlin, that's also part of the reason the Java numbers are in decline, though it doesn't help explain why it's Javascript that has overtaken it...

Pay attention to gestalt of the industry

[SuperKendall]

Like what? [I'm sincerely curious.]

Here I assume you are referring to "Javascript slowly spreading to other realms as well". Have you not read about Electron apps recently? Or used apps like Slack which are based upon Electron...

Also I find it perverse that node.js is taking over server development. Really? At what scale?

Perhaps you have heard of a little company called Netflix?

You can also get a sense of it from StackOverflow.

I don't do much server development these days myself, or any node.js. But an important part of being a professional in any field is try try and keep your ear to the ground as it were and know about industry trends. Just from paying attention to general StackOverflow questions, talking to other developers around the world, you get a sense that Javascript has really grown in general use, especially so I'd say at medium sized companies.

If you look at the chart it's in a little bit of a decline from the peak but is still above Java... I think that is showing the continued strong performance of Python taking over some roles Javascript has been taking over.

Re:Pay attention to gestalt of the industry

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as AC since I already modded the discussion, but ...

Your link to the StackOverflow, while good, lacks insight as to the use of their language or how long the language has been around. You could have, for instance, a language that has been around for a long time and so many questions have been asked and answered that there's no need to ask new questions. Perl comes to mind. Not saying that Perl's use rivals Java, but Perl's place may not be as low in the graph as the graph makes the reader wonder so.

Re:Pay attention to gestalt of the industry

[dromgodis]

I think that is showing the continued strong performance of Python taking over some roles Javascript has been taking over.

I would guess that the Python upswing can largely be attributed to it being very popular in machine learning.

Re:Pay attention to gestalt of the industry

[SuperKendall]

That is part of it for sure, but I've seen a real upswing in even non ML developers liking and using python for things like server development, or maybe just learning the language because the Jupyter notebook thing works so well.

Hmm.

[neiras]

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello World!");
    }
}

Sure, you need the compiler and jvm to run, just like you need a giant browser to run JS on the client, or node and all its friends to run it on the server. Pretty comparable.

Re:Hmm.

[lgw]

10 PRINT "Hello World"

This will always be the easiest, especially when the interpreter is built into ROM on a machine that boots in a few milliseconds. Nothing will ever top the Commodore 64 for ease of unpack box -> hello world.

Re:Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, HelloWorld "compiled" running on the Java VM took:

26,616 kBytes - as measured from "time"

the same in BASIC - Seen as a slow , and inefficient language, took 1672

So Java was "only" ~16 larger in memory footprint. Wow, much fast, so efficient.

Now add the bloat of the class libraries, helper libraries, 15 versions of the JVM for "compatibility" and we get the specs above.

Re:Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, HelloWorld "compiled" running on the Java VM took:

26,616 kBytes - as measured from "time"

the same in BASIC - Seen as a slow , and inefficient language, took 1672

So Java was "only" ~16 larger in memory footprint. Wow, much fast, so efficient.

Now add the bloat of the class libraries, helper libraries, 15 versions of the JVM for "compatibility" and we get the specs above.

ok now try writing a useful program and then get back to us

Re:Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Been there done that. Basic has been OO for quite some time.

Useful programs are not written in Java. Java is for toys and other non-critical stuff.

If it takes 24Mb for hello world, imagine what an actual useful app would take.

Games are OK, who cares if the user input is dropped.

Crapplets are OK, who cares if it takes 10 mins to load, user time is free!

Re:Hmm.

[neiras]

Useful programs are not written in Java. Java is for toys and other non-critical stuff.

I've personally worked on Java banking systems and financial applications. Pretty critical non-toy stuff.

You seem to be confused about the difference between source->bytecode compilation time, jit time, etc. With a jit system, the bytecode is effectively compiled to native machine code on the fly - first time a path is hit it gets compiled, then afterwards it just runs. Java code is *fast*.

Re:Hmm.

[NormalVisual]

Nothing will ever top the Commodore 64 for ease of unpack box -> hello world.

The problem with the C64 comes when you need to load that code from a 1541. Might as well take a coffee break. ;-)

Re:Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

So that explains why I have to type my PIN, *twice* on the bank machine, because it dropped some user input, because the code path didn't get hit, and wasn't compiled "in time".

Then again, the bank machine is just essentially a toy front end, the serious stuff is written in cobol, a real language, with real performance, and none of this "JIT" crap.

As you will hopefully soon learn, real-time systems, and other mission critical systems have hard deadlines, and require what's called "determinism" and can't randomly drop user input.

Then again, the career ladder for Java programmers is somewhat self-limiting.

Re:Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

main = putStrLn "Hello World"

Re:Hmm.

[neiras]

Suggest you read up on JIT. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

When I spoke of working on banking software, I was talking about the backend systems that drives the bank's business processes. Batch settlement systems, internal APIs, client-facing interfaces. The stuff that makes the organization go.

I'm 18 years into a development career, and I'm doing just fine, thanks ;)

As you have seemingly failed to learn, the career ladder for socially inept, egotistical trolls is somewhat self-limiting.

Uh huh ... sure ...

[Anonymous Coward]

And McDonald's is probably the most popular food. That doesn't make it good.

To me javascript has always been a language for quick and dirty hacks, but which has grown to be used in way too many places.

If javascript counts as "development", we as an industry are in a sad state.

What is popular?

[Anonymous Coward]

When was the lasts general election for programming languages? How many programs you know and use were written in JavaScript?

The best way to define the importance is the number of CPU (micro)seconds a program of thread was run and then add the numbers for all programs wriiten in the same language over the course over a year. But then, who would want to compare programming languages by popularity?

Screwdrivers

[darkain]

While we're at it, let's talk about the most popular screwdriver brands in the world, too! https://vincerants.com/the+mos...

Don't forget with embedded ARM

[Anonymous Coward]

and openjdk you can write embedded control software in Java too.

Re:Don't forget with embedded ARM

[lgw]

and openjdk you can write embedded control software in Java too.

It's only a matter of time before my antilock brakes pause for garbage collection, I guess.

Re:Don't forget with embedded ARM

[bob4u2c]

If your antilock brakes pause, you car is garbage! Or it will be a few short seconds later.

The big question I have is will new dashboard have a "Null Pointer Exception" warning light?

Re:Don't forget with embedded ARM

[HornWumpus]

All but the very latest/greatest anti-lock brakes degrade gracefully to regular brakes.

Javascript relplaces Java in some instances.

[Jastiv]

Remember those applets and Java web start? Well, it was just as insecure as downloading a program and installing it on your machine. And, consequently it was all removed with Java 11. Javascript replaced a lot of stuff including Flash (good riddance) with its web applications. I remember when hardly anyone heard of Javascript and a lot of people confused it with Java. And now Javascipt is actually taking over a lot of Java domains. Remember when the FSF went on about the Java trap. (an issue that has since been resolved with OpenJDK) now we hear about the Javascript trap, and how websites are running non-free Javascript on your computer. I should really look into seeing if I can make Wograld into a Javascript game. I don't know how suitable Javascript is for it, since the current client is a Java program, and it is real time instead of turn based. But it might be worth looking into just for the advantage of users not needing to download a client.

language most chosen in CS1

[Anonymous Coward]

So was Pascal at one point. That doesn't make it a good or useful language. Also, it has fallen behind C# by stagnating.

I learned javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

I learned it by viewing the page source.
  I was inspired to figure out the floating popup window with the goatse pic ( that I clicked on by mistake here at slashdot!) LOL

Matlab

[Latent Heat]

Remember Madge at the nail salon talking up Palmolive dish detergent?

Madge: You're soaking in it! Salon patron: (jerks hands out of liquid)

The front-end of MATLAB is written in Java. MATLAB is a scripting environment for Java -- you can create instances of Java classes, assign them to MATLAB variables and invoke their methods. Java arrays of numeric types are more-or-less compatible with MATLAB "matrix" variables. I tell people using MATLAB, "Java, you're programming with it!" (person jerks hands away from keyboard)

I suspect that other such programming environments (Maple, Mathematica) may be doing the same thing.

I'm the skipper of a tanker . . .

[Latent Heat]

you ignorant clod!

Gimmicks

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not so much the leaning towards windows being the problem. It's more the "Look at this shiny new framework everyone should be migrating to right now because it's the new and future STANDARD," before loosing interest four years later and deprecating it. This is, more or less, what killed the Windows Phone - they blew through three different development models in six years, and nobody was going to stay on that treadmill any more.

Re:Gimmicks

[MobyDisk]

At first glance, I 100% agree with this point and wish I had mod points. This is what I fear about Microsoft sooo much. One day framework XYZ is the future, the next day it's obsolete.

But then, I realized this is a discussion about JavaScript, which is the one language that is far far worse in this aspect. Frameworks about 6 months old are considered obsolete and left to die. We chose SystemJS 2 years ago because it was super popular,, and it's like nobody's ever heard of it today. We thought we were in front of the curve when we jumped into Gulp over Grunt, and now it's the has-been. Angular 2? pfffftt.. they are on Angular 6 now. The only plus side to all this is that the young developers (1-2 years) have already seen the pain of obsolescence cycles, so they quickly learned some respect for stable platforms.

Re:Gimmicks

[dromgodis]

they are on Angular 6 now.

7

Keep up! :)

Re:Gimmicks

[MobyDisk]

I cannot post my facepalm or crying emojis, since Slashdot does not support Unicode.

Re:Gimmicks

[sjames]

Avoid frameworks at all cost.

Javascript doesn't actually NEED a framework if your developers know what they're doing. Use it as glue between the server side and the HTML displayed by the browser. I have some Javascript that was written before Node.js even existed that still works today with no changes

Re:Gimmicks

[Anonymous Coward]

> Javascript doesn't actually NEED a framework if your developers know what they're doing.

And if they have the time and money to build everything from scratch...

Re:Gimmicks

[sjames]

See the "if they know what they're doing" part. I have seen many web pages where I could easily replace a massive bulk of included javascript + framework with under 100 lines of well written Javascript. In the most extreme case, 5 lines would have done the job. It was actually more work to do it within the framework not even including the time it would take to learn how to use the framework.

Part of the problem is that there are too many "web developers" who ONLY know how to use the framework, mostly cargo-cult style.

Re:Gimmicks

[Anonymous Coward]

> See the "if they know what they're doing" part.

Right, but even if you know what you're doing, building out a Web application takes time. Part of the promise of frameworks is that they save you time (and therefore money) even if they don't always deliver on it.

Re:Gimmicks

[sjames]

As I said, the few lines of Javascript take less time and effort than the huge framework. IF you know what you're doing.

Re:Gimmicks

[Anonymous Coward]

> As I said, the few lines of Javascript take less time and effort than the huge framework. IF you know what you're doing.

I don't completely disagree, but this is not true 100% of the time. It depends on the application.

Re:Gimmicks

[Hadlock]

Oh, wow, I thought you were joking, but then I wasn't so sure, and I google it... D:

PLEASE put another lang in browser engines.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all it would take for Javascript to wither and die. Just something, ANYTHING other than JS, as a natively-supported scripting engine in the major browsers. It could be put in alongside JS, to let people start using it for new pages and slowly deprecate that ball of turd over time, like we've nearly done with Flash.

The fact that there are transpilers to WebAsssembly for dozens of other languages shows people WANT to not use js in the browser; give us the ability to do it natively dammit!

(OK, not ANYTHING. Pleas not COBOL or Visual Basic)

Javascript even more impressive then...

[SuperKendall]

I appreciate you explaining why you are posting AC on this...

Your link to the StackOverflow, while good, lacks insight as to the use of their language or how long the language has been around. You could have, for instance, a language that has been around for a long time and so many questions have been asked and answered that there's no need to ask new questions.

Given how long Javascript has been around, the trend line it has for number of questions is even more impressive!

I think comparing it to Java though is pretty reasonable since they have been around for a similar duration.

The aspect of our language questions muddying results though, is the reason why I included EJB and node.js on the chart. At the scale it has though those are pretty flat Ines, but even there it looks like node.js comes in ahead of EJB. If you killed off the languages it would probably be clearer.

I Honestly Don't Believe There Is A Coder Shortage

[IgnorantMotherFucker]

There was a widespread claim a few years back that there was a half-million shortage of Software Engineers that would reach one million by 2020. I cry bullshit on that, as it is quite difficult for many coders to find work - guys with grey hair such as myself, women, latinos, African Americans and those who specialize in coding other than web or mobile apps.

I only got back to work when I totally gave up on getting into mobile or web then hung out my shingle as a driver and embedded coder. That's worked out well but what I _really_ like a about coding?

"Check this out Mom. See what happens when I click _this_ button?" "Yes... ."

"I wrote that!" "OH MIKEY!"

Mikey Likes To Make His Momma Proud.

I have traced that million-coder shortage claim to the Obama Administration's Official Whitehouse Blog from 2013, which reported that there would be openings for 1.4 Million coders in 2020, but that there would only be 400,000 new CS graduates.

But consider that my own degree is in Physics yet I do just fine. That blog cited the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics for both figures but I have been unable to find the original publication - if there even is one. I emailed a specific individual at the BLS who was in that general line of statisticsifying but got no response. Later this week I'll send a few dead trees to them.

My own take is that hiring managers and recruiters are completely unable to judiciously select the right candidates to interview due to - as I've read repeatledy, no citation but RSN I'll have one - that job board posts for coders result in on the average one thousand applications.

Surely that would make your own eyeballs bleed.

The Balkanizations of languages, applications - web back end, front end, mobile, embedded, systems, MIS even nuclear weapons design - results in it being very very difficult for the right coders to connect to the right companies. That and the fact that Google Trends convinced me that the single most-consistently searched-for keyword is "jobs" resulted in my building what - by 2020 I hope - will be a comprehensive list of links directly to the Jobs or Careers Portals of every Computer Industry that hires through its own website. BEHOLD:

• The Global Computer Industry Index
• Telecommuting and Remote Work

(The exceedingly basic web design is intended to enable my site to work well for the ancient boxes and browsers found in the developing world, most rural public libraries as well as those owned by low-income people.)

About a month from now I'll form a Non-Profit Corporation to take over the operation of Soggy Jobs. The IRS takes about a year to approve 501(c)(3) Tax-Deductible Status, at which point I'll apply for charitable grants from Google.org, employment- and economic development-oriented philanthropists, and government employment and economic development agencies.

That will enable me to hire - just at first - an Entry-Level SQA Engineer, a Journey-Level Back End Developer and a Senior Front End Developer; I've got lots of plans for modern boxes and browsers that I shan't divulge until they... wait for it... Beta.

After the IRS approves my deductible status I'll form subsidiaries in most industrialized nations then apply for their non deductible statuses. That's going to be really complicated and will require some cash as I'll have to retain a bunch of non-profit corp formation attorneys.

San Francisco consistently gets the most hits. My most-loved page is that for

TypeScript turns JavaScript into Java

[aberglas]

Well, almost.

But as it slowly dawns on the JavaScript community that statically declared types are a really useful concept, TypeScript et. al. are becoming much more popular.

So eventually you will see JavaScript as a Java like language for practical purposes. A surreal, twisted Java for sure, but with the three most important features Java introduced to the mainstream. Garbage collection, type safety, and, using incredibly complex compilers, efficiently compiled code that is not C.

C++ is where the problem started ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

It's astounding to see C++ grouped with C and Assembler.

Cue Sesame Street, "One of these things is not like the others"...

Python Training in Chennai

[saipreethi]

Great content thanks for sharing this informative blog which provided me technical information keep posting. python Training institute in Chennai