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Programming IT Technology

Programming Language Popularity Survey 68

Posted by timothy from the logo-also-loses dept.
An anonymous reader writes "David N. Welton yesterday posted a study of the Programming Language Popularity. Is SQL your fave, or perhaps you're interested in the 'Click Price of PHP' or 'Craig's List Jobs'? Needless to say, my favorite languages (Prolog and Common Lisp) did not so much as register on the survey."
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Programming Language Popularity Survey More

Programming Language Popularity Survey

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  • Just because Cobol registered, I wouldn't call it popular.

    Just used when necessary, I'd think.
    • Last paragraph in this article: collecting this data has been an interesting exersize

      I assume he means "exersize" of his fingers.
      ----
      The Secrets of Innovation [blogspot.com]

    • Re:Cobol? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TykeClone ( 668449 )
      And if it's necessary enough - it's popular.

      Remember Y2K when all of those millions of lines of COBOL code had to be fixed (or at least fudged).

      COBOL does what it does and does it well enough that it's not been unseated, but it sure as heck isn't cool.

      • COBOL does what it does and does it well enough that it's not been unseated, but it sure as heck isn't cool.

        How tough would it be to write a COBOL-to-C parser? (Or COBOL-to-yourlanguagehere.) (Here's a COBOL-to-Java [mapage.noos.fr] attempt...)

        I'd love to see COBOL programs ported to Perl. They could then be made into web services, or just continue to run as-is (but possibly on a different machine, if the old machine that's running COBOL doesn't support Perl).

        • Don't know - I did some programming in RPG, but not in COBOL.

          A better question is "would java generated from cobol code be cool?"

  • Not too valid. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BigZaphod ( 12942 ) on Saturday September 25, 2004 @02:05PM (#10349910) Homepage
    This "study" has been showing up all over the net over the past couple days. I don't understand why it keeps getting so much attention. It is basically just a bunch of google searches and pretty graphs which tell you very little. It claims to be a programming language survey and yet has entries like "Windows programming." What language is that? Heck, there isn't even a c++ option and c++ is probably still one of the most popular of all languages.
    • I was thinking something like that as well. I know when I'm looking for answers for problems in Perl or Java, I do NOT use a term like "perl programming", I just use "perl" or "java".

      It seems to me most queries using a language name and "programming" would be from people with little experience in the language and trying to find general info.
      • That works for a few languages, but if you look further down in the listings for "Java" you might discover that it is not only a programming language, but there is, of all things, an island called Java;-) Likewise, "Python" turns up results about large snakes.

        So "programming" was tacked on in order to try and concentrate on the relative differences between languages, rather than just getting all possible hits for a language.
        • Yeah, but if you're searching for something specific, that will often narrow it down. For example, searching for:

          +java +IOException

          will pretty much kill any chance of matches including references to coffee or the island.

          • Google queries (Score:3, Informative)

            by DavidNWelton ( 142216 )
            The question is: how to get the best possible results out of google, where "best results" mean few false positives, and rather than exact numbers, numbers that can be compared across languages. Adding "programming" is a nice way to get rid of false positives, while still assuring a "level playing field" between all languages. Adding "language" or "programming language" might work well too, although they wouldn't work so well for oddball things like windows or unix that I threw in for fun.
            • It might be in a case like this (which, it seems a lot of us don't consider a valid study).

              My point is that most people USING a language and searching for help or info on that language aren't likely to include "programming" as a key word.

              I know when I find results in a search, I rarely see someone write "java programming" on the web page or the post to whatever forum. It's more like, "I've got a problem with a network connection, here's the code, here's the error, what do I do?" And the answer posted is
              • You are talking about search queries, and your assertions are indeed correct. However, Google does not release that information as far as I know. It would certainly be another interesting dimension to add.

                What I am talking about is google results. How many pages turn up if you type 'java' or type 'java programming'. There are of course some defects with this - it might be considered 'visibility' rather than 'popularity', and yet... and yet it does count for something, folks.

                How can you consider it inv
              • maybe you should start. It is quite likely that whichever page has programming support questions and answers will probably have the word "programming" somwhere on the page.
          • Yeah, but if you're searching for something specific, that will often narrow it down. For example, searching for:


            +java +IOException

            will pretty much kill any chance of matches including references to coffee or the island.

            Reminds me of when my passport got stolen.
          • I don't know about that, I've seen my coffee maker spit out some odd things when something goes wrong.

            Ya I know it was stupid.
    • Exactly. Anyone who had a use for this information could whip up this entire "report" with 15 minutes and a web browser and Excel.

  • Google Hits (Score:3, Insightful)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Saturday September 25, 2004 @02:09PM (#10349933) Homepage Journal
    Not convinced of the relevance of google hits with regards to different languages. People search for information about different languages for different reasons. It also seems fairly logical to say that the easier a language is to learn and use - the less one needs to search for information about it.

    • Re:Google Hits (Score:4, Insightful)

      by michaelggreer ( 612022 ) on Saturday September 25, 2004 @02:23PM (#10350043)

      I agree. I am also unimpressed by the following analysis:

      In the case of .Net, this is especially impressive, given the relatively short time the platform has been in existance. It is likely that a significant portion of the hits are in some way the result of Microsoft's marketing dollars.

      Given that Google ignores punctuation, it seems most likely that they got a listing about "net language" rather than ".net language". More a result of poor methodology then marketing dollars.

  • c# (Score:2)

    by Quill_28 ( 553921 )
    Did they combine c# into the c programming group?

  • Missing languages (Score:2, Interesting)

    by omibus ( 116064 )
    I think he left out a lot of languages. Delphi should certanly register, as well as a number of scripting languages (vbscript, javascript). It looks like he just picted a subset of languages that he could think of and used those.

    I dont consider this to be great research on their part.
    • Well, yeah, I like Delphi too, but one has to face reality.

      This dude from Sun gave a slide with language rankings which I never have been able to find on the Web, and I missed the methodology. You have to understand he was pushing Java.

      According to him, there were only 3 languages that mattered: VB, C/C++ (this was pre C#), and Java. VB over the last several years had a solid 10 million users (people doing VB programming), C/C++ was around 5 million and also steady, while Java was at 3 million and cli

  • The results...

    Nobody who cares about programming languages is popular.

    Thank you, I'll be here all week.

  • ... Not getting the point... (Score:5, Informative)

    by DavidNWelton ( 142216 ) on Saturday September 25, 2004 @02:57PM (#10350237) Homepage
    Unfortunately, I don't seem to have communicated the idea behind the survey very well. Let's give it a go here before too many snide, uninformed comments show up about "windows programming".

    *) It is for fun. If I were investing the time and money to produce a survey for you to base your business on, I would not give it away for free, or I would have at the very least aimed for publishing it in a magazine like Dr. Dobbs.

    *) This means that I used the resources at my disposition as best I could. Those include freely available sources on the web. Part of why I think the survey does have some broad validity is that I tried to find a variety of sources (which you would realize if, you uhm, actually read the article). In a future version, I think I will also attempt to include data from Amazon about books available for whatever language.

    *) Why isn't XYZ in the list?! There are lots of programming languages out there. In a recent gig, I was programming Erlang, and liked it a lot. But to give some sort of cutoff, I chose the Overture dollars/click data, which isn't present for lots of "minor" languages. By the way, Cobol figures better in Overture than Lisp and Prolog do, even though Lisp is in my opinion far, far more interesting.

    *) If you think the methodology could use improvement, well then by all means send me some email with your ideas, or if you're the independent sort, go off and do your own work if you think you can do better.

    *) Google Hits. Yes, I used that. I also used 3 other data sources, so RTFA before you make uninformed comments. In any case, even if there are some problems with Google hits, they *do* represent the visibility of the language. Suggestions on how to deal with specific queries such as VB vs "visual basic" are of course welcome.

    *) "Windows" and "Unix" programming. Those who engage their brains for a second or two might come to the realization that, no, they are not programming languages, but queries I threw in as extra data points, for the fun of it. Sheesh.

    Does that put it in a clearer like for those of you with your knickers in a knot?

    Thanks,
    -Dave
    • Why isn't XYZ in the list?! There are lots of programming languages out there. In a recent gig, I was programming Erlang, and liked it a lot. But to give some sort of cutoff, I chose the Overture dollars/click data, which isn't present for lots of "minor" languages.

      C++ is a minor language?

      Face it, your "survey" is lousy, and you can't handle the criticism, which on Slashdot was going to be inevitable no matter how good your survey was.

      • C++ is a minor language?

        Did you miss where I said I was likely to add that? It's right at the top of the article. Didn't you read it?

        Face it, your "survey" is lousy, and you can't handle the criticism, which on Slashdot was going to be inevitable no matter how good your survey was.

        Most of the criticism is of the rude "this sucks" variety, which isn't at all constructive or worthwhile - and in many cases it's obvious that the person in question did not even read the article. It is indeed irritating,

  • Can't Find the F-Word (i.e. FORTRAN) (Score:4, Funny)

    by reporter ( 666905 ) on Saturday September 25, 2004 @03:03PM (#10350275) Homepage
    A quick scan of the report indicates that the F-word (i.e. FORTRAN) cannot be found. We are finally ridding ourselves of this albatross.

    Don't get me wrong. I program in FORTRAN for a living, but I have compared it to C and Java. FORTRAN is an ugly language. It fosters the same disgust that x86 assembly code would foster if we lacked compilers and were forced to program in it on a routine basis. FORTRAN is just a bunch of mishmash that has grown to include every interesting feature that catches the fancy of programmers. The current definition of FORTRAN even includes pointers!

    • People have made some reasonable suggestions about languages to add. Fortran, Delphi, and C++ (although the "C/C++ issue" presents itself here) are things I will probably add, because they show up in the Overture results.

    • Re:Can't Find the F-Word (i.e. FORTRAN) (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You maybe ridding yourself of fortran but "we" (big chunks of the HPC community) are not: There WAS a fad for recoding stuff in C or C++, but people are now going back to fortran since they've realised that numerics-heavy and efficiently vectorised fortran code is easier to read than numerics-heavy and vectorised C code (assuming you know both C and fortran and the relevant extensions to C). Don't write an OS kernel in Fortran. Don't write a weather simulator in C. Don't write anything in VB.

    • Re:Can't Find the F-Word (i.e. FORTRAN) (Score:4, Informative)

      by beliavsky ( 814870 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @06:50PM (#10357713)
      Since the 1990 standard it's spelled "Fortran". I've noticed that people who misspell it often have little knowledge of it.

      In their handling of arrays, C and C++ are closer to assembly language than Fortran. Allocating a 3-D array in Fortran is done with just

      real, allocatable :: x(:,:,:)
      allocate(x(2,3,4))

      In C/C++ you declare a pointer to a pointer to a pointer -- talk about ugly!

      Fortran 90/95 pointers are less powerful (and dangerous) than those of C/C++ but are still useful. Often I find myself referring repeatedly to an array section. Using a pointer I can refer to this section more concisely.
      • I'm sure you can use pointers in Fortran if you really wanted to. In C++, you would either use a library, or, if forced to rely on only standard stuff, something like

        valarray<double> x(2*3*4);
        • With valarray x(2*3*4); you have a 1D array -- you can't refer to the last element as x[1][2][3]. In Fortran, after allocating 3D array x(2,3,4) you can refer to element x(2,3,4) or to slices such as x(2,2:3,:). Fortran has natively supported multidimensional arrays for 50 years. C and C++ natively have only the 1-D array, awkwardly constructing multdimensional arrays from arrays of arrays.
            1. For crying out loud. No it is as much a 3D matrix as Fortrans, which is that a 3D matrix is mapped onto a 1D arrays, because that is the way computers work. The point is:
              1. There are several libraries that do exactly what you want, with the same syntax.
              2. writing x[1][2][3] is better than the C++ STL way, which would be x(1*(3*4)+2*(4)+3), but a simple utility class would render this as x(1,2,3), which is better than the Fortran way, IMHO. And as I said, this is by unfairly crippling C++ by not using an app

  • SkillMarket (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mshiltonj ( 220311 ) <mshiltonj AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday September 25, 2004 @03:13PM (#10350346) Homepage Journal
    Um, I've been tracking this for a while.

    http://mshiltonj.com/sm/">SkillMarket -- A daily look at in-demand tech skills

  • A few methodology problems (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Saturday September 25, 2004 @03:26PM (#10350437)
    Beyond the ones listed already:

    *For things like TTCL, shell, and SQL, these are usually secondary skills wanted along with another language (C, perl, PHP, Java). This means an artificially inflated count for them

    *Bias in the web. A lot of programming subareas just don't have much web presence- firmware for example. A lot of these are tilted to C, Cobol, and Fortran. Nobody writes firmware in Java.

    *Internal code. Most projects are never released to the public. Unless they have a job opening being advertised, we don't know what language they're using.

    *Job listings- there's an inherent assumption that web job listings are reepresentative of the industry as a whole. It may be, but I have no evidence either way. It wouldn't surprise me to see web-realted jobs have a higher proportional representation.
    • These are all reasonable points, thanks for putting some thought into it.

      While Tcl is indeed a programming language in its own right, SQL and shell scripting are often combined with other things, so yes, that probably inflates their value some. But it's more fun to put a variety of things and see what turns up.

      Web bias - certainly, but I'm working with what I've got... PHP is probably much more visible because of this, for instance. Ideas for non-web biased data sources would be appreciated. Jobs is p
    • firmware for example. A lot of these are tilted to C, Cobol, and Fortran. Nobody writes firmware in Java.

      Yes they do, Sun released a chip with a native Java instruction set in 2000 or so. Noone writes firmware in Cobol or Fortran.

      • Re:A few methodology problems (Score:4, Insightful)

        by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @05:03PM (#10357118)
        Nobody uses it. When you work with firmware, saving 5 cents per unit is a big deal. We lost a debugger port on our latest hardware because the extra development time was cheaper than 3 cents a unit. If you can use C and get a cheaper processor and less RAM, you use C. Period.

        I don't know of Cobol in firmware (I had meant to write maiinframes as well, thats where Cobol came from), I do know some using Fortran. Mainly for math routines linked into C frameworks.
  • I love VB. Not the new .NET version which is fully OOP, or VBs 5 or 6 which both compiled to machine language, no. I love the old VB4- which only compiled to P-Code. The only nice thing about newer VB6 style components was DLL Hell.
    • But VB is not a programming language but a development tool that includes a BASIC dialect as the programming language...
    • You have obviously not programmed in a real language. VB is way too wordy to be readable, the underlying object structure that M$ throws at you is too redundant and obfuscated to be efficient. I have written many, albeit reasonably stable, application in VB to know it's serious shortcomings.

      Don't be blind, open your eyes to real programming languages and you will never look back. However if you wish to live in a Microsoft world along with all the other M$ speudo programmers making very little, be my guest.
      • Are you a fucking idiot? I am not trying to flame you on here, but are you so full of your "I am too good for VB" programming self that you could not see that sarcasm dripping from my post?

        BTW, I have done some programming in VB and ASP (VB's bastardized web language) and the pay was really good (a few years ago). I do agree that because there are so many shitty VB programmers it is hard to stand out as a good one. However, everyone I worked with at my two VB contracts came from a CompSci/C style backgr

        • Sounds like someone could do with a sarcasm detector. Yeah sure, like *that's* going to work. ;)
        • You're right, I was a little harsh with my post.

          I am a self taught programmer who started programming spreadsheets about 6 years ago. I coded alot of VB and many of the apps I wrote are still functioning to this day. At the time that I moved away from VB was due to terrible experience trying to build a large VBA application on Access.

          Microsoft always stated that VB was Object Oriented language and at the time, I had no idea what that really meant. However after doing extensive OOP in Java and JavaScript,
  • Googling for a language is a completely useless way of determing the popularity. Three of the first 10 results for ".net programming" have nothing to do with .net at all. By the same logic, programming with the Windows COM object model ranks along side C in terms of popularity - "com programming" returns 35 million results. This study has no credibility whatsoever.

  • Not very credible (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sorry if this comes across as a troll (posting as AC isn't helping, I'm sure), but this isn't very credible. A Google query for "sql programming" may well fall into the PHP, Java or any other category. It most certainly can't stand on itself in this particular survey. The data is hopelessly flawed from the outset.

    The FA even says: "SQL doesn't have a lot of web space devoted to it, but it's sure important in the job market."

    Why doesn't the author draw the logical conclusions when the facts are staring hi
    • Hi,

      Thanks for your constructive, helpful and anonymous comments...

      You state that "SQL doesn't have that many pages because it's independant of the programming language used".

      So you are saying that because something is language/implementation independant, it will be less visible on the web? So XML will be less visible than Tcl or Perl, if we had to make a prediction based on your theory? If SQL is used by all those languages, shouldn't its web presence be larger, rather than smaller? What is it about l

      • Re:Not very credible (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        > because something is language/implementation independant, it will be less visible on the web?

        Yes, because people discussing Oracle or Sybase programming may never even use the word "SQL". The queries would be biased towards MS-SQL and MySQL.
  • As long it doesn't have LEGO, it isn't credible.
  • Despite Welton and /. at large having declared Perl too uncool to mention, Perl still inconveniently produces a consistently high reponse on all measures, not as far behind C(++/#/etc) and proprietarily overpromoted Java as most everything else is behind Perl.

    When was the last time anybody told you how good Perl is? It seems almost every other language has its band of zealots pushing it at any pretext, yet despite a complete absence of aggressive promotion, it seems people just keep using Perl.

    Just for th

  • COBOL isn't dead (Score:3, Interesting)

    by X-Nc ( 34250 ) <nilrin@NOSPAm.gmail.com> on Monday September 27, 2004 @11:51AM (#10363751) Homepage Journal
    This article has already been beaten to death but I wanted to add my useless opinion anyway.

    COBOL isn't dead. It isn't just for mainframes either. COBOL is quite alive and kicking. The latest ISO standard for it was just released in 2002. It's got functions, can do OOP (better than C++, BTW) and still can crunch data batter than any other language out there. It's a shame that the preconceptions and stigma perpetuated by people who haven't seen COBOL since 1968 are really hampering the usefulness of this really good langauge to the detriment of every developer in the world.

    Disclaimer: The programming I do is 75% php, 10% perl and 15% in shell/awk/grep/whatever. It's just that I have a liking for programming languages in general and like to keep an eye on them. There's a lot of very good ones out there that most everybody misses; icon, Eiffel, Smalltalk, Ada, REBOL, Lua, Dylan...

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