The Rise And Fall of Languages in 2010

http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/229100358;jsessionid=S2HMJB000P3PBQE1GHPSKHWATMY32JVN?actionType=twdl

by fogus • 15 years ago

41 24 15 years ago

Ugh, Tiobe. I wish we could come up with a better measure for this. I don't really feel that Tiobe's index is worth anything at all.

zeteo• 15 years ago

"Over the years, the index has been both praised and vilified. The latter by language adherents who are unhappy over the decline of their favorite idiom."

Really? That's the best defense that can be brought for the methodology - a textbook ad hominem attack?

chromatic2• 15 years ago

Criticism merely reinforces the uncomfortable truths that the programming elite have silenced for so long! Anyone who asks for reproducibility in science is part of the conspiracy too!

marcusbooster• 15 years ago

JavaScript with a double-arrow drop in 2010?

rbanffy4• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiobe_index

"Tiobe programming community index is an ordered list of programming languages, sorted by the frequency of web search using the name of the language as the keyword"

Maybe people are searching more for specific frameworks and libraries instead of the language. I work mostly in Python and it's been a long time since I last googled for "python". These days I google for "django" or "appengine".

rbanffy4• 15 years ago

Ada, RPG on OS/400 and Transact SQL? Really?

Anyone risks a hypothesis on why this happened in 2010?

protomyth2• 15 years ago

Lot defense work, people not replacing OS/400 machines and still needing new features, and MS sold a lot of databases this year[1].

[1] If you go through your corporate approval process to replace mysql because your mad at Oracle, don't be surprised if SQL Server walks in the door.

rbanffy4• 15 years ago

Why would I want to replace MySQL. It's GPL. Larry may scream all he wants and business will continue as usual. The worst that can happen is to use a forked version.

Drizzle is very interesting, BTW.

autarch• 15 years ago

I thought TIOBE was vilified because it does a really bad job of measuring what it claims to measure.

hristov• 15 years ago

Yes and if you believe their data, Pascal and ADA are also on the ascendancy.

chipsy• 15 years ago

I can see some rationales for both modern Pascal dialects and Ada as application languages. Foot-shooting is less readily achieved than in C or C++, and the compilers and libraries are mature, so you can do some pretty heavy lifting. As well, Oracle is scaring people away from the JVM, so where the answer for a lot of apps used to be "Java, period," now we're probably seeing more investigation of alternatives.

mahmud• 15 years ago

I can't imagine anyone being chased away from Java by Oracle's IP claims would run to Java. They are such different languages, so much so that this assertion is as audacious as claiming people who recently quit smoking are becoming addicted to cabbage and other leafy vegetables.

postfuturist• 15 years ago

This paints a very different picture: https://github.com/languages

edit: I realize this is measuring something different, but it suggests that the reports of the decline of Ruby and JavaScript could be wrong.

CJefferson• 15 years ago

There are two major problems with this:

Any project which has html documentation, which contains javascript, gets counted as javascript.

git and github in particular seem very popular in some communities (ruby is a good example) and less so in others (C++ comes to mind, as one I am familar with).

steveklabnik2• 15 years ago

Github tries to alleviate some of this, but they're not great at it yet. They've said in the past that they discount the existence of well-known JS frameworks like jquery.

alxp• 15 years ago

BitBucket seems to have a lot of Python projects hosted there which might take a chunk out of Python's share on Github.

rwmj• 15 years ago

Because obviously the most popular languages must be the best ones.

chromatic2• 15 years ago

... and obviously it's trivial to filter out false cognates when analyzing search term volume.

... and obviously it's statistically meaningful to compare year over year trends without accounting for changes in global search volume.

... and obviously you can trust an index even if it doesn't know the difference between a web browser and a language implementation.

gaiusparx• 15 years ago

Alternative opinion: http://langpop.com/

russell• 15 years ago

The langpop link is interesting because it does an analysis by source. If you are familiar with Craigslist, you can see some of the problems with the methodologies. The SF Bay Area is heavily into web development, so PHP is no surprise. But C and C++ are second and third and essentiallt tied. That much C development going on? Not really. The majority of listing have C\C++ some where in the acronym stew, just to indicate that they want real programmers. So what were companies hiring a year ago, when last I looked? PHP, Java, C#, Ruby, and C++. All the rest was HR noise. But it's more interesting than nothing.

jacquesm• 15 years ago

Allright, who has been playing with the random number generator?

One thing you'll have to do before looking at the data presented here (if you want to give it a second look) is to take into account that there is a lot more to programming than just web programming.

But even with that in mind I have a hard time seeing Assembly on the rise and JavaScript dropping and named in one breath with delphi.

And I'm not a fan of any of those (ok, maybe assembly), so that can't be it.

If you want to skip the article to go right to the data it's here:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

jawee• 15 years ago

I fear that attempting to name the "best" languages is just as fruitless as trying to name to the most "popular" languages.

The Rise And Fall of Languages in 2010

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