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Zona Research Does Programming Language Poll
Anonymous Coward writes "Zona Research has polled a group of developers regarding their favorite development tools. Visual Basic is far more popular than I would have previously thought, given the amount of griping I hear about it. Not suprising that C is still quite popular. Java finishes third...due to its relative youth, or are developers simply not using it that much?" The story's from Yahoo.
Well, if you asked a group of embedded systems engineers what language they used for fine tuning time-critical sections in drivers, you would see that Visual Basic is not popular, while 90% of the developers seem to be using asm for their ``applications''.
I'm sure VB is hot for business apps. But I can't say I care. What about real-world apps ?
One heck of a lot of programmers use Pascal (because of Delphi), and we're a lot out there using C and C++ because of run-time efficiency and portability, and because of language sophistication (well, that holds for C++ at least).
The main problem I guess is, that people tend to see the most popular language (or, the one that requires the most programmers to work with it) as the ``winning'' language. In real-world large applications however, a number of languages are often used. LISP/prolog for the extensibility and AI parts, C for the APIs, C or C++ for the core parts, Pascal/VB/objc for the front-ends etc. etc.
The fact that a language has a lot of programmers either reflects that it is a language which is good, or a language which require many people working with it to actually get results.
You be the judge.
What this survey proves is that the term 'developer' today is a far cry from the same term used 10 years ago. VB didn't exist like it does now (it was there, but it wasn't the same product). Large corporations like packages such as VB or Developer2000 for many reasons.
1) It's easy compared to the likes of C++ or java and because of this, you don't need to hire top-notch talent. The pool of available 'programmers' is much larger. Don't underestimate how important this is to a company.
2) They are RAD tools - much quicker development and turn-around times.
--That being said, these packages have their limits, especially when it comes to producing a large transaction-based system. I would never trust such a system built upon one of these packages.
We use Java here in the academic environment /extensively/. I work for the IT department of a large university (Cornell, 30,000 people), and our distributed infrastructure is being developed primarily with CORBA and Java, as are the new apps we're kicking out. Because of changing client-side API, specs, implementations, Java has been so far, a boon on the server side, but I think it's alive and kicking on the client too. JDK 1.3 is going to make it even better, with the incorporated HotSpot engine, which I've already seen to speed up client-side apps. I haven't seen the poll, but it's scary to think that many people have chosen Visual Basic as their favorite. I can understand if they are forced to use it...but personal favorite? Was it just MS lackeys and novice kiddies who think VB is the coolest thing?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Remember the persian chessboard problem*? Rate of growth is at least as important as amount.
* For the proverb impaired, a king promised a young man a reward of his choosing. The young man asked that the king take a chess board, put one grain of wheat on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so forth. The thing is that this ends up being:
As anyone with an alpha can tell you, 2^64 is a huge number. I heard somewhere that this number was quite a bit more than the annual grain yield for the whole world for any given century.-- Slashdot sucks.