Viability of unpopular programming languages

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/04/17/unpopular-languages/

by weinzierl • 8 years ago

93 95 8 years ago

gaius4• 8 years ago

This analysis is misguided because many of those languages are DSLs, e.g. ABAP, Apex, F#. No one using them has the option of using a general purpose language (and they are well-paid enough not to care). Whereas Perl 6 is in direct competition with general purpose languages. And it really is time to give up on flogging that dead horse.

varjag2• 8 years ago

How F# is not a general purpose language?

tluyben2• 8 years ago

And how can you not use C# in that case? I understand you might not want to but...

gaius4• 8 years ago

It’s not used as such, at least I’ve never seen it used like that. You would typically see it used by quants in an otherwise C# shop.

fsloth• 8 years ago

F# is very much a general purpose language. The tooling and infrastructure allows one to do nearly everything that can be done in C# in F# as well, and if one needs to use C# for something that is not really an issue because the languages are fully compatible.

True, there are some things that are best done in C# like WPF, but that is not a sufficient handicap to truncate F# from the population of general purpose languages.

gaius4• 8 years ago

Don’t get me wrong, coming from an OCaml background I am a fan of F#. But I don’t see it going mainstream anytime soon, and I don’t think that that matters at all to anyone who uses it.

juststeve2• 8 years ago

F# to me would be a nice upgrade from powershell for ops/infrastructure code, due to terseness, a strong type system, and some similar syntactic concepts between both languages. many times i want to go 100% F# but due to the issues integrating f# i end up either having to write a lot of powershell, or shoe-horning C# classes and end up with two languages.. dont know what the fix is..

lizmat• 8 years ago

Sorry, the horse does not agree it's dead.

hpcjoe2• 8 years ago

"Rumours of my demise are greatly exaggerated." -- Mark Twain, who may or may not have been writing about Perl, Perl6, and other languages that are no longer hip.

phillipcarter3• 8 years ago

Just chiming in to say that F# is not a DSL - it's a fully-fledged programming language. Not in use nearly as much as C#/Java/etc., but it's not a special-purpose language.

pg_bot• 8 years ago

Just because something is unpopular doesn't mean that there is a reason for it. It is actually surprising how few users you need to have a viable programming language.

trisimix2• 8 years ago

Especially if you can compile the language to an executable or something distributable.

hackermailman• 8 years ago

Or you can compile to another language, like writing web apps in OCaml using BuckleScript or using other language libraries via FFIs https://realworldocaml.org/v1/en/html/foreign-function-inter...

tribby• 8 years ago

it's kind of like the viability of unpopular social networks. people want to be where their friends are. if more people I knew used perl6, I would use perl6, because it's a beautiful language.

tyil• 8 years ago

Feel free to come make some friends in #perl6 on Freenode!

walshemj• 8 years ago

Very Surprised that Pl/1 ranks above Haskel

p0nce• 8 years ago

I've found that many confuse the question "is it a viable programming language?" with "does it stand a chance to be top-10 popular?". The second proposition is much harder than the first, and many language will need mass appeal to get to the top-10 ; which is not necessarily without consequence on the language itself.

onion2k• 8 years ago

The fewer users a language has the longer it'll take to hire someone, which means there'll potentially be a long wait for what your team can deliver. If you're a startup a long wait before delivering means you'll run out of money and shut down. If you have a choice, factor hiring team members very highly in your tech stack choices.

MichaelMoser123• 8 years ago

Some of these languages might come with some inherent advantages that give you an edge over the competition (like memory safety in rust). If the founders are well versed with a new technology like this than that would give them the edge.

The problem is that it needs some serious backing for a prog language project in order to become a contender in this game. It is far more than a weekend project (+the founders seeking to apply this knowledge should be well versed in the subject matter)

It might be that the end of 'moores law' will make such factors more important to the success of a project, more competition and a smaller margin will lead people to look for other differentiators, so to speak.

AnimalMuppet• 8 years ago

Some of these languages might come with some inherent advantages that give you an edge over the competition in certain situations. So, use those languages in those situations.

Every programming domain has its yak-shaving aspects. Use whichever language and libraries that minimize the yak shaving, so that you can get on with what you're really trying to do.

opk• 8 years ago

No, just hire a "programmer". It really doesn't take long to get up to speed in a new language and can make it more fun, adding to motivation. In any other profession job adverts don't specify the exact make and model of tools being used so why is it always required with programming?

krapp2• 8 years ago

No, just hire a "programmer". It really doesn't take long to get up to speed in a new language and can make it more fun, adding to motivation.

It doesn't take long to learn the absolute minimum of many languages, but that might just give someone just enough knowledge to be dangerous, not useful. I would not, for instance, assume that my knowledge of javascript more or less prepares me to write banking software in COBOL or drivers in C, even if javascript and C share a lot of common syntax.

In any other profession job adverts don't specify the exact make and model of tools being used so why is it always required with programming?

Because "programming" is not the profession. Programming specific applications in specific languages that meet specific business needs is the profession - and the necessity for domain knowledge beyond the bare minimum required to produce correct syntax is always more important than the language itself.

camgunz• 8 years ago

The language itself is (usually) the easy part. If you need a senior frontend engineer, JavaScript knowledge is table stakes. You need someone who can collaborate with product and design, and work with the engineering team on platform and implementation decisions. If you need a senior backend engineer you need someone who's really familiar with server side APIs, database behavior, and data model patterns who can advise the product team on what is reasonably possible and what is practically impossible. And these are just the baselines; we're not talking about emergencies, outages, modern software development (continuous integration, testing, deployment, etc.), or "intangibles" like attitude.

Basically that's why hiring engineers is so hard. There are 1000 variables and really they're all important.

sheepmullet2• 8 years ago

The fewer users a language has the longer it'll take to hire someone

In practice that only seems to be true for rapidly growing companies.

I've got a list of 30-40 F# devs I could hire in my city. On the other side of the equation my dev team only adds 1-2 new devs/year.

In practice we typically take less than a week to fill an opening.

jcadam• 8 years ago

It actually seems like it ought to be easier to find a good programmer when you're hiring for one of the more obscure languages like F#, OCaml, Erlang, Clojure, etc.

The total number of available programmers may be less, but most of them are probably going to at least be decent (they were self-motivated to learn a non-mainstream language, after all). If you're trying to find a great Java developer (in which case what you're really looking for a great developer who is willing to code in Java for money), you're going to waste a lot more time sifting through legions of incompetent code monkeys to find somebody good (one good screening filter: if Java is the only programming language they know -> reject).

nathan_long• 8 years ago

The fewer users a language has the longer it'll take to hire someone, which means there'll potentially be a long wait for what your team can deliver.

The number of available devs to hire is $JOBS - $DEVS. Eg, there are lots of Ruby devs, but also lots of Ruby jobs, so you're competing for the few Ruby devs who are on the market.

OTOH, there are a small but enthusiastic number of developers using Elixir, Haskell, Rust, etc and wishing they could get a full-time job in it, because there are (currently) even fewer jobs with those languages.

You need to factor in not only "how many devs know this language?" but also "how much demand is there for jobs using this language?" If a ton of devs know Language X but most of them hate it, you're not going to have an easy time hiring them.

toast0• 8 years ago

I've been working in Erlang* for almost 7 years. We mostly hire smart people and give them an Erlang book and help them get settled. I think only one or two hires used Erlang before they worked here, everyone else learned it on the job, myself included. It might be easier to onboard people if our stack was more usual, but Erlang is a perfect fit for our application.

* And to work on all the surrounding bits, of course also C and PHP and Perl and even python if it comes up.

Tade02• 8 years ago

Haskell has better public relations than all these languages.

Haskell has had a rant about JavaScript on its official wiki for a few years(the wording changed to a less offensive one eventually), so the bar is pretty low here.

andrepd• 8 years ago

The excellent tooling, documentation and package repository for Haskell is invalidated because of a rant about js?

Tade02• 8 years ago

On the official wiki

Actually - it's not the rant - it's the superiority complex. The fact that someone thought it would be a good idea to drop filth on another language there and nobody protested says a thing or two about the community.

I mean, it literally said "JavaScript sucks ...".

I see this condescending attitude a lot among people who do functional programming.

Case in point: The only library that currently implements the Maybe monad as specified by Fantasy Land is called "Sanctuary.js" - as in "Refuge from unsafe JavaScript".

Why the smugness? It surely doesn't help.

saosebastiao• 8 years ago

Haskell has excellent tooling, documentation, and package repositories? When the hell did that happen?

bryanrasmussen• 8 years ago

no, but these things probably aren't the only things that go into 'public relations'

hpcjoe2• 8 years ago

Many proxies suffer from a set of problems relating to specificity, applicability, and how much you can infer from quantitative data.

Specificity, in that you are attempting to model one specific question with another, which might not even indirectly answer the question. You make an inference on this, and this inference could be quite wrong.

Applicability ... are you or the proxy really measuring what you intend? Is the proxy applicable as a metric?

I won't fisk this post. I will point out that people have been beating on Perl for a long time (all versions), as a "dead horse". It decidedly isn't, from my vantage point in a number of areas.

Cool, it is not. Hip, it is not.

More importantly, dead, it is not.

Perl6 is interesting, I've not done much there yet, though it looks like a great general purpose language.

slx26• 8 years ago

To me it comes down to usage: if given a problem X you are likely to chose language Y to solve it, then Y is viable. That sentence probably sounds super obvious, ok. The important point is realizing that the critical question there is: Am I likely to chose language Y? And realizing that the answer doesn't depend on popularity. For a general-purpose language popularity is probably a big factor, but for other languages that shine in solving particular problems it might not be very relevant. The question, as I say, is: is there any scenario where I would chose this language over other alternatives? If the answer is yes, then I'd say the language is viable.

stonemetal• 8 years ago

Popularity to a certain extent is a prerequisite for viability. Given problem X, and given that language Y is the most suitable language to solve problem X, how likely are you to chose language Y to solve it? If you are unaware of language Y's existence? If you have heard of Y on a internet forum but have seen zero lines of language Y code? If you have written 10 lines of language Y but you are the only dev at your company to have done so, and all other code at your company is written in Z?

The more popular Y is the easier it is to choose, not because we are pop culture, popularity hounds but because popularity conveys certain benefits. Libraries and infrastructure, documentation and blogs, knowledge in other people on the team. That is why large companies are able to so successfully produce new languages, they are able to pay people to convey those benefits without the chicken and egg problem of natural growth popularity. For an interesting example of this D is almost the same age as C#(2001 vs 2000). D had to grow its user base and tools organically vs C# hitting the ground with thousands of devs working on an in it full time.

sho3• 8 years ago

I, for one, find the TIOBE index absolutely incredible - ie, I don't believe it at all. As it says:

"The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date"

C is #2. Javascript, for better or worse the most important language for web dev, is #8. So what is this list implying - that JS developers should get with the times and learn C?

Without details on how this list is compiled, I think it's pretty useless. Even the most cursory search of any job site will show orders of magnitudes more jobs for "unpopular" languages like JS, ruby and golang than for C. I'm not even sure what C is used for these days beyond kernel/driver development or embedded systems. I think I've met precisely one C developer in the last 10 years.

Maybe I live in a bubble but this list just seems divorced from (my) reality.

LandR• 8 years ago

Maybe I live in a bubble but this list just seems divorced from (my) reality.

Are you a web developer?

Yes, C# and Javascript are all the ads I see for developer jobs, if I'm looking at web developer jobs.

But doing a search in my area for C/C++ developers and plenty of jobs vacancies come back.

Plenty for Java too, one for Python (from my cursory look, the Python position I saw was the highest paid too, by a good margin).

The whole world doesn't use javascript, some of us want nothing to do with it / avoid it like the plague.

I would agree though, if you just want to play a numbers game it's probably safest to learn JS, C# or Java nowadays if all you care about is getting employed.

lukev• 8 years ago

This cuts both ways though. Sure, if you learn Java you'll be likely to find employment.

If you learn Java and also Scala and Clojure, and some Haskell and R just to round out your experience, then you will find a much higher paying job regardless of what language you end up doing, because you'll not only be better at programming in a "standard" job but you'll become eligible for more niche, higher-paying positions.

carlmr7• 8 years ago

I'm not even sure what C is used for these days beyond kernel/driver development or embedded systems. I think I've met precisely one C developer in the last 10 years.

I meet hundreds every day, and nary any web developers. I'm working in an embedded shop though, so YMMV on personal experience here.

I learned some JS in school but haven't needed it since. Except writing some extensions, which was easy enough to learn in an afternoon if you know C-like languages. (I used TypeScript to be fair, much easier for me, why anyone would use pure JS is beyond me).

I'm not sure TIOBE is useful for anything either. But a lot of legacy programs in C need maintenance. A lot of government software, flight control systems, banking systems etc. are probably still in large parts C.

Just look at the salaries of COBOL developers (where is that on TIOBE again?), and you'll see that maintenance is big business. And that language is as ANCIENT as ALLCAPS.

Looking as C is still at the heart of almost everything, I think maintenance work will still be a big consideration for the next 50 years. It might not be sexy or what you want to do though.

quanticle• 8 years ago

I'm not sure I agree with your point about COBOL developers, though I do agree with your larger point about C. The reason that COBOL developers get big bucks today is because so few of them remain. During the late-80s and the '90s, there were massive layoffs that decimated the COBOL job market. The developers earning big bucks today doing COBOL doing today are the ones that survived those layoffs, not your "typical" COBOL developer. I would wager that the median COBOL developer either transitioned into management, out of the industry or is working in a completely different language today.

sho3• 8 years ago

OK thanks for that. I guess you confirm that I do, indeed, live in a bubble!

gtirloni• 8 years ago

Without details on how this list is compiled, I think it's pretty useless.

"Since there are many questions about the way the TIOBE index is assembled, a special page is devoted to its definition."

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-defi...

sho3• 8 years ago

Thanks for that. OK, that indeed confirms the list's uselessness.

TL;DR: It counts all the hits on N search engines for any language with its own wikipedia page.

Obviously that will bias towards older languages with a large cumulative number of mentions. I don't see it as useful for evaluating the current popularity of languages.

ashleyn• 8 years ago

I also have a hard time believing that VB6 is more popular than Objective-C.

osullivj• 8 years ago

If VB6==VBA then we're including Excel power users, and there are a lot of them.

JustSomeNobody• 8 years ago

Maybe I live in a bubble but this list just seems divorced from (my) reality.

Drive down the road and look around. There are sensors and devices on poles everywhere. Your car iteself, elevators, automatic doors, etc. Think of all the devices that you encounter in a day. There's an entire world of software out there that has absolutely nothing to do with web technologies.

trisimix2• 8 years ago

Yep, any emerging physical technology most likely had low level developers behind it. The low level guys are the ons who make it compatible with the high level stuff too.

pif• 8 years ago

software_development.web != software_development

throwawayReply• 8 years ago

The index is clearly not credible:

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/visual-basic-dotnet/

There is no way that in reality visual basic is surging up the charts and more popular than most other languages, instead I would guess they are attributing some .Net results to VB instead of C#.

for comparison, this is the google trends chart of visual basic: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=visual%2...

dwc• 8 years ago

Hi! Developer working in C here. I'm neither a kernel dev nor an embedded dev.

My current job is network programming on the core product of my employer. It's "legacy" in the sense that it's been around a long time but it's actively developed and continually extended to meet rapidly evolving customer needs.

I also wrote C in my previous job doing non-flight software for a space mission, analyzing telemetry, processing image data, automated planning of camera targeting, etc. Much other work was done in scripting languages, and when those weren't performant enough for the task then I wrote C libraries to do the heavy lifting for them to interface with.

You don't live in a bubble. There are whole segments of the software industry where you'll never see C developers, and there are many companies where you C could (should?) be used but isn't because it's unhip and old. Software development these days is pretty fragmented and there's a tendency for people to think that their experience describes everything, but it's not the case.

ddevault2• 8 years ago

You 100% live in a bubble.

First of all, I'm a C developer. Hi!

Second of all, web developers are not the majority they think they are. The internet is huge, sure, but remember it's not just running on web browsers. It's also running on servers which have network interfaces that need drivers and implementations of the IP suite, through firewalls, routers, switches, and load balancers that are all written in C, and running your trendy web app in a hypervisor that's written in C. Your database - be it PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Redis, etc - it's written in C. Your web browser uses C for loads of stuff like sqlite, rendering, etc. The Python and Ruby interpreters are written in C. The .NET CLR is written in C, too.

Beyond the internet, C has an even more pronounced presence. Every microcontroller around you - your fridge, microwave, coffee machine, car, subway train - all written in C. The code on your phone is at least 50% written in C. Your fancy mouse and keyboard? C. Manufacturing robots in factories are coded in C. CNC machines and PNP machines are written in C. 3D printers are programmed in C. Airplanes are programmed in C, and trains and boats too. All spacecraft are programmed in C, from the Curiosity rover to the Rosetta spacecraft (and it's lander) to the international space station.

All of your utilities like grep, ls, git - written in C. So is the code that's decoding the music you're listening to right now, and the YouTube video you watched earlier, and most other multimedia code is C. Your crypto libraries are written in C. Compression algorithms are usually implemented in C. Most font rendering is done in C. Nginx, postfix, openssh - C.

All that being said, TIOBE is probably bullshit. I can't imagine C isn't #1.

cdancette• 8 years ago

Maybe you live in a bubble too. That's just a guess but a majority of windows programs may be made in C#

DonaldFisk• 8 years ago

Airbus and Boeing both use Ada for their avionics.

bumblebritches5• 8 years ago

I'm also a C dev, Hi OP.

dom96• 8 years ago

I have my doubts about it as well. They incorrectly ranked Crystal higher than it should have been because there is this phenomenon known as "crystal programming" which clashes with the Crystal programming language[1]. To their credit, they fixed it when I emailed them about it, but who knows what other misrankings exist.

1 - https://meanings.crystalsandjewelry.com/how-to-program-cryst...

52-6F-62• 8 years ago

So what is this list implying - that JS developers should get with the times and learn C?

Presently on said path. You want to program hardware for satellites? Because C is how you program hardware for satellites (etc).

In serious, there seems to be a ton of jobs out there for C(& C++) developers. Funny though— if you search for "software engineer" or "software developer" you're not likely to see them rise to the top of the list. You'll probably have to more specifically search for "hardware" or "embedded" developer and you'll find a ton looking for C/C++, assembly(in various incarnations and sub-specs), and Java ME.

paultopia• 8 years ago

Supporting this view from the linked post: "A few of the more obscure languages that TIOBE ranks higher than Haskell are Scratch, D, ABAP, Apex, and PL/I."

Scratch? If TIOBE is measuring children learning a language in middle school, maybe, but I take it that's not what people ordinarily mean by language use or popularity...

fnordsensei• 8 years ago

I wouldn't go so far as to say that widely used is the same as popular. That implies an overall positive attitude towards the widely available thing.

We all know that there are things that we use regularly but wish we didn't.

larkeith• 8 years ago

There is a severe lack of evidence in this post for the author's assertion that "Common Lisp, Erlang, and F# would all be safer bets" than a nebulous "several more popular languages" - his entire argument seems to be that Common List and Erlang have been around since the '80s, and F# shares resources with C#.

Also, an S-curve does not seem an appropriate representation for the benefits of a larger userbase - diminishing returns are not synonymous with asymptomatically approaching zero returns, and the idea that the first few users are worth negligible amounts seems wildly inaccurate.

phillipcarter3• 8 years ago

I think the author's point about F# stands w.r.t it being a .NET language. Many services and products have officially supported .NET libraries and SDKs, which means that if you use F# you can leverage that support.

allengeorge• 8 years ago

I think the author is making an implicit and questionable assumption: namely that the top end of the S curve doesn’t dip back down again. But that’s not true. Standards change, use cases change, operating systems change, and unless there’s a lot of work going into maintaining those libraries - or building new ones - the existing libraries slowly become less useful. Yeah, they provide a base, but then you’ll have to work around a quirky bug because you’re using it in a way the original author never intended, or other libraries you need to solve this problem don’t exist, or...

My point is that the S curve only remains an “S” through constant ongoing effort by the community, and that’s what makes a language viable _for a domain_.

(I should also point the it that that curve actually represents the viability of a language for a particular problem domain.)

misja111• 8 years ago

All these discussions are useless as long as there is no objective way of measuring the quality of a programming language.

majewsky• 8 years ago

as long as

Implying there ever will be.

wincent• 8 years ago

Funnily enough, the index update this month is: "April Headline: Perl is having a hard time"

Source: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

"At the moment there are 2 programming languages in the top 20 that have lost more than 3 positions in 1 year's time: Objective-C and Perl. The reason for the fall of Objective-C is clear. Apple abadoned Objective-C a couple of years ago and replaced it by its successor Swift. Moreover, mobile app development is moving to platform independent languages and frameworks, so even Swift, which is only available on Apple's systems, has a hard time. But what about Perl? Till 2005 it was the most dominating scripting language in the world. In 2008 we said in an interview with Dr. Dobb's Journal that Perl would go extinct based on the trend we saw in the TIOBE index at that time. After this a religious war started with Perl diehards who claimed that this won't happen and that the TIOBE index was being gamed. Stevan Little gave a ground-breaking talk in 2013 called "Perl is not dead, it is a dead end" indicating that once software engineers leave the Perl language they will never come back. Personally I think that the fork of Perl 6 (and its delays for decades) together with the unclear future of what was going to happen to the language was the main reason for engineers to look for alternatives such as Python and Ruby. And still today the Perl community hasn't defined a clear future, and as a consequence, it is slowly fading away."

Viability of unpopular programming languages

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