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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.
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...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
JS was the reason I never did get into webdev besides some minor pages that just use CSS and HTML.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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!]