2017 Top Programming Languages(spectrum.ieee.org)
spectrum.ieee.org
2017 Top Programming Languages
http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programming-languages-2017
14 comments
duplicate of yesterday's post
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14811321
I love Haskell, but... Haskell is about as popular as SQL? That makes no sense.
In real live people dont care about functional programming...
I believe that in your real life, they don't.
In the bigger picture functional programming has made huge inroads. Facebook has a Haskell team whose product handles up to 1 million requests per second, and it's also in production at AT&T, Microsoft, Google, Barclays, New York Times and many smaller outfits. The other day I read about a Haskell-like language being used for high-speed, low-latency trading for a hedge fund.
But there are probably at least 100x more SQL developers out there.
In the bigger picture functional programming has made huge inroads. Facebook has a Haskell team whose product handles up to 1 million requests per second, and it's also in production at AT&T, Microsoft, Google, Barclays, New York Times and many smaller outfits. The other day I read about a Haskell-like language being used for high-speed, low-latency trading for a hedge fund.
But there are probably at least 100x more SQL developers out there.
Yea because almost all databases use SQL, and zillions of businesses use databases. FP is only a tiny subset of industry coding, but popular in academia and high profile companies.
Because research teams at huge tech companies totally represent the "real life" of normal companies.
There are by far more small companies using Haskell & FP than large ones. I mentioned large companies because they are recognizable. So what is your point?
That's because functional programmers are living the dream.
I noticed that too, I like haskell, but I don't believe it.
SQL may be an outlier because not that many people refer to themselves as "programming in SQL".
Conversely, there are plenty of weekend Haskellers who enjoy discussing it whenever possible.
Conversely, there are plenty of weekend Haskellers who enjoy discussing it whenever possible.
How can you tell someone is a Haskeller?
Don't worry; they'll tell you.Is that how data works? "Oh it does not support my feelings so it must be wrong?!" Haskell is nice, granted, but not as popular as you might feel.
Pretty sure parent meant SQL is far more popular than Haskell, despite parent's love.
I thing GP might have implied the reverse. SQL is to databases what JavaScript is to the web.
I don't understand these kind of rankings. What are you supposed to conclude from them?
My point is that computer programming as an industry is so diverse and complex that these general comparisons become almost useless.
Some examples:
* If you live in a town with lots of government agencies and big corporations then it is a lot more important to understand some obscure Java or .Net framework than even mainstream languages like C or C++.
* If you live in a place with a big financial industry or hardware development then probably understanding the arcane details of C++ and compiler idiosyncrasies is more useful than any web-related language.
My point is that computer programming as an industry is so diverse and complex that these general comparisons become almost useless.
Some examples:
* If you live in a town with lots of government agencies and big corporations then it is a lot more important to understand some obscure Java or .Net framework than even mainstream languages like C or C++.
* If you live in a place with a big financial industry or hardware development then probably understanding the arcane details of C++ and compiler idiosyncrasies is more useful than any web-related language.
Something's fishy with this ranking, ie. web-only list has "Processing" before "Clojure", "PHP" before "Ruby" and "Go", for enterprise-only "C" before "Java" - I don't buy it, this data looks like garbage.
Perhaps your circle of experience isn't representative of the wider community? Personally, I don't find the ranking of PHP surprising. One word, WordPress. Plus, there are probably bespoke PHP applications running in countless companies.
Still, Processing as a web language?
It makes sense to me:
http://processingjs.org/
There's also a whole website that allows people to learn programming by using Processing (guessing either a fork or alternative to processingjs or something else) and it's pretty popular. I think Khan Academy had a variation of it too. The canvas in the browser makes a useful tool for Processing to use.
There's also:
http://hello.processing.org/
Which is interactive and has a video lecture attached to it all in-browser.
Now if your concern is processing in production, I cannot comment on that, but for academic use (people learning programming) it's really useful. It is also useful for visual designers so wouldn't surprise me if they use it on the web too.
http://processingjs.org/
There's also a whole website that allows people to learn programming by using Processing (guessing either a fork or alternative to processingjs or something else) and it's pretty popular. I think Khan Academy had a variation of it too. The canvas in the browser makes a useful tool for Processing to use.
There's also:
http://hello.processing.org/
Which is interactive and has a video lecture attached to it all in-browser.
Now if your concern is processing in production, I cannot comment on that, but for academic use (people learning programming) it's really useful. It is also useful for visual designers so wouldn't surprise me if they use it on the web too.
It's interesting to play with their ranking editor. It really does highlight how variable some of these lists are depending on what you consider to be part of a "top" language.
For example, I'd personally completely remove stack overflow questions. It could mean a language is incredibly complex rather than important or commonly used.
For example, I'd personally completely remove stack overflow questions. It could mean a language is incredibly complex rather than important or commonly used.
Excellent point. For example, I almost never need to search or look up documentation for React.
But for Angular 2, I can't do anything without looking up the documentation (at least they did an excellent job writing it).
So I would say you are right that StackOverflow is a better indicator of complexity than popularity.
But for Angular 2, I can't do anything without looking up the documentation (at least they did an excellent job writing it).
So I would say you are right that StackOverflow is a better indicator of complexity than popularity.
Or it could be that the best resources for information about a specific language exist outside of stackoverflow; I think this is often the case with Rust, for instance, where I will generally turn to users.rust-lang.org, or IRC for questions that I would turn to SO for in other languages; and when I end up googling particular questions I more often end up at somebody's personal blog.
Perl was also hit hard by this for awhile as it had its own PerlMonks site that was where people went until recently.
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Far less likely to see Java in embedded / systems programming so I'm not surprised by C being before Java. Remember this industry is pretty big and reaches all other industries and there's also policies that companies or clients build up on.
PHP is way more popular than Ruby in my circles so I guess it matters where you are and who you know.
Isn't it just based on search hits?
yes, looks completely unrepresentative to me
I don't understand why HTML is in there? I can obviously understand the scripting languages you can embed in HTML being there, but they're listed separately anyway.
They have an explanation for that in the full blog post http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-2017-top-pro...:
"(This is a great moment for us to reiterate our response to the complaint of some in years past of “HTML isn’t a programming language, it’s just markup.” At Spectrum, we have a very pragmatic view about what is, and isn’t, a recognizable programming language. HTML is used by coders to instruct computers to do things, so we include it. We don’t insist on, for example, Turing completeness as a threshold for inclusion—and to get really nitpicky, as user Jonny Lin pointed out last year, HTML has grown so complex that when combined with CSS, it is now Turing complete, albeit with a little prodding and requiring an appreciation of cellular automata.)"
"(This is a great moment for us to reiterate our response to the complaint of some in years past of “HTML isn’t a programming language, it’s just markup.” At Spectrum, we have a very pragmatic view about what is, and isn’t, a recognizable programming language. HTML is used by coders to instruct computers to do things, so we include it. We don’t insist on, for example, Turing completeness as a threshold for inclusion—and to get really nitpicky, as user Jonny Lin pointed out last year, HTML has grown so complex that when combined with CSS, it is now Turing complete, albeit with a little prodding and requiring an appreciation of cellular automata.)"
>used by coders to instruct computers to do things
I get what they are going for and I don't really disagree but by this logic chrome/firefox .exe should probably be the top most widespread programming languages.
I get what they are going for and I don't really disagree but by this logic chrome/firefox .exe should probably be the top most widespread programming languages.
Cheers, I hadn't seen that.
This is a common complaint. It's not mentioned in the interactive chart, but the print article explains their reasoning.
I wouldn't place a lot of importance in the rankings. Instead of trying to rationalize why your favorite language is not higher/lower than others, figure out the area you like programming in, e.g. higher ed, healthcare, database kernels, machine learning, etc. Then search around for the common tool sets used in that area and get proficient at them.
The fact that the Trending chart lists COBOL at all, let alone as high as 30th place, seems very peculiar.
It's huge in finance.
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"Arduino" is a programming language now?
The name Arduino refers to a platform. This platform has its own programming language. The platform is actually a fork of Wiring[1]. It seems there is really no better name for the language other than "the Arduino language."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiring_(development_platform)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiring_(development_platform)
The page you linked literally says "programs are written in C/C++".
Where's Kotlin?
The reason some people are complaining about this chart is that the weighting of the sources they use seems to bias towards new technologies.
They aren't listing this based on a single metric such as 'jobs in this programming language' or 'sites run on this programming language', but more a level of how trendy it is.
They have 12 sources scored out of 100, the defaults are:
-100 "IEEE Xplore" (Publication): This will bias new popular and emerging languages as a journal is more likely to cover topical interests.
-50 "Google Trends" (Trend Tool): Google trends will also bias as the results from the trends tool are relative and not absolute. If "Arduino" leaped up in searches while "PHP" stayed the same, Google Trends would overweight Arduino.
-50 "GitHub Active" (Code Repo): This one I'm ok with, but it depends on the definition of active and how much weight is given to the size of the project. Does two projects having at least one commit in 30 days mean that WordPress' PHP repo is just as active as my_fist_Haskell repo?
-50 Google (Search): It's unclear what's being measured here, volume of searches? Volume of results? Quality of results? The other consideration is if you know a language well or have sources you trust in that language you might not be searching at all.
-30 GitHub Created (Code Repo): I think this is overweighted unless it filters out inactive repos or those with only a readme file?
-30 Stack Overflow Views (Q/A Site): This seems like it should be much higher.
-30 Stack Overflow Questions (Q/A Site): Unclear if this is questions this year, or questions total. If it is new questions this year that will heavily bias the results to emerging languages. It's also unclear if this counts specialty stack exchanges.
-20 Reddit (Social): Seems like a bias sample to include as some projects choose this as their homebase for communication and others don't.
-20 HackerNews (Social): We're also realistically a bias sample as we're more likely to talk about trendy languages even if it doesn't have a large following.
-20 Twitter (Social): I don't use Twitter enough to comment on this, but I think it is important to define what is being measured here. Raw tweet count? Reach? Engagement?
-5 Career Builder (Job Site): ...Why?
-5 Dice (Job Site): ...Never heard of it.
What's missing?
I would have liked to see jobs from LinkedIn, AngelList, Stack Overflow Careers etc included, as well as volumes of subscribers for educational sites like Udacity, Udemy, FreeCodeCamp etc.
They aren't listing this based on a single metric such as 'jobs in this programming language' or 'sites run on this programming language', but more a level of how trendy it is.
They have 12 sources scored out of 100, the defaults are:
-100 "IEEE Xplore" (Publication): This will bias new popular and emerging languages as a journal is more likely to cover topical interests.
-50 "Google Trends" (Trend Tool): Google trends will also bias as the results from the trends tool are relative and not absolute. If "Arduino" leaped up in searches while "PHP" stayed the same, Google Trends would overweight Arduino.
-50 "GitHub Active" (Code Repo): This one I'm ok with, but it depends on the definition of active and how much weight is given to the size of the project. Does two projects having at least one commit in 30 days mean that WordPress' PHP repo is just as active as my_fist_Haskell repo?
-50 Google (Search): It's unclear what's being measured here, volume of searches? Volume of results? Quality of results? The other consideration is if you know a language well or have sources you trust in that language you might not be searching at all.
-30 GitHub Created (Code Repo): I think this is overweighted unless it filters out inactive repos or those with only a readme file?
-30 Stack Overflow Views (Q/A Site): This seems like it should be much higher.
-30 Stack Overflow Questions (Q/A Site): Unclear if this is questions this year, or questions total. If it is new questions this year that will heavily bias the results to emerging languages. It's also unclear if this counts specialty stack exchanges.
-20 Reddit (Social): Seems like a bias sample to include as some projects choose this as their homebase for communication and others don't.
-20 HackerNews (Social): We're also realistically a bias sample as we're more likely to talk about trendy languages even if it doesn't have a large following.
-20 Twitter (Social): I don't use Twitter enough to comment on this, but I think it is important to define what is being measured here. Raw tweet count? Reach? Engagement?
-5 Career Builder (Job Site): ...Why?
-5 Dice (Job Site): ...Never heard of it.
What's missing?
I would have liked to see jobs from LinkedIn, AngelList, Stack Overflow Careers etc included, as well as volumes of subscribers for educational sites like Udacity, Udemy, FreeCodeCamp etc.
I was hoping to see Elixir on the list, but I suppose it may have been classified as Erlang?
Surprised that Python eclipses everything... or am I reading this wrong?
It depends. If you changed the ranking there are some instances where it is trailing i.e jobs
Swift is already in the top 10. I don't think it has been widely adopted as a cross-platform language yet.
I think Swift has the potential (and the chops) to become big. IBM (and a few others) is really pushing hard on adopting it as a server side language, their Ubuntu support is pretty good, but some Windows/Android support will be welcome for sure.
Which one? There are two languages named Swift:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(parallel_scripting_lang...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(parallel_scripting_lang...
Actually 3 if you count SwiftForth, but everyone knows Swift means Apple's new language as realistically nobody has heard of the other two outside small niches.
I never used any Apple device and have no idea how popular Swift is, I also never coded Objective-C despite using C and C++ a lot in my hobby programming.
It'd not surprise me that IBM was supporting something niche/enterprise-y though, especially an "implicitly parallel programming language that allows writing scripts that distribute program execution across distributed computing resources,[2] including clusters, clouds, grids, and supercomputers", seems like their thing.
Thanks for the downvotes for asking I guess.
It'd not surprise me that IBM was supporting something niche/enterprise-y though, especially an "implicitly parallel programming language that allows writing scripts that distribute program execution across distributed computing resources,[2] including clusters, clouds, grids, and supercomputers", seems like their thing.
Thanks for the downvotes for asking I guess.
I've never used an Apple device either apart from an iPhone 1 10 years ago and mostly only program in Python. I hope my post didn't come across as condescending/combative or in anyway demeaning (hard to tell context in a post). I was just saying most people on HN wouldn't confuse the 2. Thanks for pointing out the latter btw (which I'd never heard of before, but looks really cool). I didn't downvote you btw, just responded.