Someone has gone through a huge effort to chart out the popular languages. The popularity is measured using various aspects, looking at job postings, number of programming books, most discussed.
For the search results the top 3 ranks are:
- C
- Java
- PHP
The top 3 ranks from the discussion sites are:
- C
- Java
- Python
Some observations from this.
In spite of a lot many languages coming up, C seems to be still ahead of all, sometimes with huge margins. I am too tempted to say that this indicates that performance is still the core issue in software development. A lot of us will agree that many easier, readable and good-for-programmer’s-productivity languages are out there, but these features have still not been able to compete with performance. Going by the same logic, Java ahead of C++ indicates that C++ is lagging behind as a high-level language, and neither has it been able to replace C in systems programming. I am still a C++ fan, I admire its flexibility and also acknowledge that it is not easy. But I think the difficulty to understand its underlying philosophy is hurting much more than anything else.
It will be very interesting to see how the chart evolves. I think that Erlang and languages like OCaml will rise in future, they are offer USPs which others don’t. We had another measurement recently, the salary survey, which kind of aligns with Java being the second most popular language.
Should the popularity affect your choice of programming language? No, but it is a good indication of where the industry is going.
November 7th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
It is interesting to note that both of us had similar reactions (with minor differences) to this article.
I got this from the list of referrers on the langpop page.
Dorai