6 ms·

Swift, HTML and C++ make the list for languages and technologies in high demand

20 points by jamescustard 11y ago

dpflan 11y ago
A chart and the related data would be useful here.
- reticulated 11y ago
  Wholeheartedly agree. I couldn't find the source report - anyone manage to?
askyourmother 11y ago
Two recent startups I worked with in London are using C++14 as a main part of their architecture, in addition to Python, JS and Erlang. Its 2016 and performance is back in vogue. For years we have been told, Developers are expensive, embrace frameworks, ignore the bloat, just ship quick, even if it needs a billion servers to run. Both firms are building amazing products on very conservative hardware requirements, so they can scale if required, but they actually know and understand their full stack, and it shows. One had started with too much Python and Go, before realising the error, the other took a detour into JVM country, before getting back onto the main roads with C++.
- pjc50 11y ago
  What field of business - finance?
- melling 11y ago
  Go and Java aren't slow. The JVM is highly optimized and is competitive with C++ . I thought that was settled a decade ago.
  - rb808 11y ago
    For regular business problems JVM is good enough. If you want compute or memory efficiency applications you can't beat low level, which is why OSs, databases, and big widely used user applications like Chrome/Excel/Photoshop are written in C/C++.
  - blub 11y ago
    Depending on the performance requirements of the problem domain and the definition of "slow" and "competitive" your comment could either be true or false, which makes it rather meaningless. The matter has not been settled and will become more important if the industry decides that gaining developer productivity at the cost of software inefficiency is no longer worth it.
  - w8rbt 11y ago
    With regard to speed and pure portability, neither are comparable to C++. Also, C++ is not a corporate controlled language like the others. It's an ISO standard. So there's no comparison to be made there either. Corporate controlled languages do not allow developers to fully control the software that they produce. C++ allows this and it's very fast and safe (even safer since C++11). Microsoft has C#. Google has Go. Apple has Swift. Oracle has Java. Which would you want to lock your software into? Also, most all of those languages (or at least the critical parts) are implemented in C++ (hotspot).
    - pcwalton 11y ago
      > C++ allows this and it's very fast and safe (even safer since C++11). The security track records of large-scale security-sensitive software written in C++ support the opposite conclusion. > Also, most all of those languages (or at least the critical parts) are implemented in C++ (hotspot). Go is not, and never was, implemented in C++.
      - d0lph 11y ago
        Are you sure you're not thinking of C? At any rate I'm not sure that you can say much more than C is a popular language, and thus has a larger share of poorly written code. It _would_ be nice to see the number of security flaws in a given language graphed against language popularity, but I don't buy that code written in one language or another is necessarily more or less secure.
        pcwalton 11y ago
        > Are you sure you're not thinking of C? Yes. Modern C++ is neither memory safe in theory nor memory safe in practice. > I don't buy that code written in one language or another is necessarily more or less secure. The entire security industry, more or less, disagrees with you. Though I should qualify this with the obvious statements that (a) dynamic languages admit classes of security bugs that static ones don't; (b) no language will magically eliminate all security bugs. But it's just an empirical fact that C and C++ admit lots of memory safety bugs that result in security problems way, way more often than memory-safe languages do.
  - IncRnd 11y ago
    That's a red herring. Java only appears as fast as C++ for workloads that don't require speed, e.g. human time vs. computer time.
- untog 11y ago
  I'm not so sure, that sounds like blaming outside flaws on a programming language. What would anyone be doing that Go, written properly, wouldn't be fast? As another poster has said, the JVM is also plenty fast when used properly. Sounds like they went from Java with heavy frameworks to C++ with no frameworks.
  - Kurtz79 11y ago
    C++ used properly will be always faster than Go or Java used properly. In many applications the point is not to be "fast" but "as fast as possible".
- CuriouslyC 11y ago
  I think this your mis-characterizes things a bit. The benefit of frameworks and highly dynamic languages are is that for early stage products, they allow you to rapidly iterate while you're finding a product-market fit. There is absolutely no reason to worry about performance when you are still counting active users in some multiple of thousands, and a large part of the product could potentially be rewritten at any time. Once you have found a product-market fit and what you're offering has stabilized to a large degree, then it makes total sense to go back and rewrite things to improve performance and eliminate technical debt.
  - blub 11y ago
    The advice above is seductive, but wrong. Obviously one should look at performance requirements when developing the software architecture and check if various stacks fulfill them. Ignoring performance is a gamble and in the worst case one might find that improving performance means rewriting everything.
    - CuriouslyC 11y ago
      The sorts of performance issues that will require a complete application rewrite aren't the result of the software stack used, but algorithms/data structures/etc. If you are working in polynomial or exponential time/space it doesn't matter what language/framework/etc you use, your scaling capability will be limited. In my experience, if you set things up properly the only part of the server side stack that is unavoidably difficult to transition is the underlying data management layer. If you have good examples (outside of latency constrained applications like multi-player gaming and finance) where a decoupled micro-service architecture would need to be completely rewritten (rather than just rewriting hot services/aggressively caching), I'd love to hear them.
      - blub 11y ago
        I don't see how that would work. Picking the wrong algorithm will almost never result in a rewrite of the whole app, unless the entire app consists of just one algorithm or someone has consistently failed to pick efficient algorithms. What do you do if you wrote your app in Python and you need high-performance multi-threading? What do you do if you chose Java and your heap is way too big? Get ready for a lot of pain, that's what.
melling 11y ago
Objective C has fallen much more than Swift has risen. Is iOS development falling off?
- icpmacdo 11y ago
  Finding resources to learn modern ios development in objective c is no longer possible
- hlfcoding 11y ago
  If you look at NSHipster and other sources in the iOS community converting their code samples to Swift only months after its initial release in 2014, it says something about the pent-up demand for a nicer language than ObjC. Plus Swift seems to be designed for ObjC devs to have an easy transition, although slightly less dynamic (and unsafe). Demand for iOS development could be tapering due to app market saturation; saw a post recently around here about that.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
k__ 11y ago
So Swift replaced Objective-C? A friend of mine, who was a iOS dev from the beginning told me about this, but I didn't imagine it going so fast. He's a bit sad about this, because he did a few years of web stuff and wanted to switch back to mobile, now he fears his Objective-C skills are wasted.
- melling 11y ago
  Programming in iOS is more about knowing the API's. Switching from Objective C to Swift is not difficult. With Swift there's actually less code to write. Compare the snippets in this blog: https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/should-i-use-objective-c-or-swift-for-writing-ios-apps/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/should-i-use-objecti...
SimeVidas 11y ago
And HTML pretty much includes JavaScript.
kalefranz 11y ago
Either the reporter or the Toptal report itself conflate percentage growth with absolute usage. Sure Swift has had huge growth--it's coming from nothing. JVM and python have huge market share; their numbers are just saturated and mature probably.

20 points by jamescustard 11y ago

dpflan 11y ago

A chart and the related data would be useful here.

reticulated 11y ago
Wholeheartedly agree. I couldn't find the source report - anyone manage to?

askyourmother 11y ago

Two recent startups I worked with in London are using C++14 as a main part of their architecture, in addition to Python, JS and Erlang. Its 2016 and performance is back in vogue. For years we have been told, Developers are expensive, embrace frameworks, ignore the bloat, just ship quick, even if it needs a billion servers to run. Both firms are building amazing products on very conservative hardware requirements, so they can scale if required, but they actually know and understand their full stack, and it shows. One had started with too much Python and Go, before realising the error, the other took a detour into JVM country, before getting back onto the main roads with C++.

pjc50 11y ago
What field of business - finance?
melling 11y ago
Go and Java aren't slow. The JVM is highly optimized and is competitive with C++ . I thought that was settled a decade ago.
- rb808 11y ago
  For regular business problems JVM is good enough. If you want compute or memory efficiency applications you can't beat low level, which is why OSs, databases, and big widely used user applications like Chrome/Excel/Photoshop are written in C/C++.
- blub 11y ago
  Depending on the performance requirements of the problem domain and the definition of "slow" and "competitive" your comment could either be true or false, which makes it rather meaningless. The matter has not been settled and will become more important if the industry decides that gaining developer productivity at the cost of software inefficiency is no longer worth it.
- w8rbt 11y ago
  With regard to speed and pure portability, neither are comparable to C++. Also, C++ is not a corporate controlled language like the others. It's an ISO standard. So there's no comparison to be made there either. Corporate controlled languages do not allow developers to fully control the software that they produce. C++ allows this and it's very fast and safe (even safer since C++11). Microsoft has C#. Google has Go. Apple has Swift. Oracle has Java. Which would you want to lock your software into? Also, most all of those languages (or at least the critical parts) are implemented in C++ (hotspot).
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    > C++ allows this and it's very fast and safe (even safer since C++11). The security track records of large-scale security-sensitive software written in C++ support the opposite conclusion. > Also, most all of those languages (or at least the critical parts) are implemented in C++ (hotspot). Go is not, and never was, implemented in C++.
    - d0lph 11y ago
      Are you sure you're not thinking of C? At any rate I'm not sure that you can say much more than C is a popular language, and thus has a larger share of poorly written code. It _would_ be nice to see the number of security flaws in a given language graphed against language popularity, but I don't buy that code written in one language or another is necessarily more or less secure.
      - pcwalton 11y ago
        > Are you sure you're not thinking of C? Yes. Modern C++ is neither memory safe in theory nor memory safe in practice. > I don't buy that code written in one language or another is necessarily more or less secure. The entire security industry, more or less, disagrees with you. Though I should qualify this with the obvious statements that (a) dynamic languages admit classes of security bugs that static ones don't; (b) no language will magically eliminate all security bugs. But it's just an empirical fact that C and C++ admit lots of memory safety bugs that result in security problems way, way more often than memory-safe languages do.
- IncRnd 11y ago
  That's a red herring. Java only appears as fast as C++ for workloads that don't require speed, e.g. human time vs. computer time.
untog 11y ago
I'm not so sure, that sounds like blaming outside flaws on a programming language. What would anyone be doing that Go, written properly, wouldn't be fast? As another poster has said, the JVM is also plenty fast when used properly. Sounds like they went from Java with heavy frameworks to C++ with no frameworks.
- Kurtz79 11y ago
  C++ used properly will be always faster than Go or Java used properly. In many applications the point is not to be "fast" but "as fast as possible".
CuriouslyC 11y ago
I think this your mis-characterizes things a bit. The benefit of frameworks and highly dynamic languages are is that for early stage products, they allow you to rapidly iterate while you're finding a product-market fit. There is absolutely no reason to worry about performance when you are still counting active users in some multiple of thousands, and a large part of the product could potentially be rewritten at any time. Once you have found a product-market fit and what you're offering has stabilized to a large degree, then it makes total sense to go back and rewrite things to improve performance and eliminate technical debt.
- blub 11y ago
  The advice above is seductive, but wrong. Obviously one should look at performance requirements when developing the software architecture and check if various stacks fulfill them. Ignoring performance is a gamble and in the worst case one might find that improving performance means rewriting everything.
  - CuriouslyC 11y ago
    The sorts of performance issues that will require a complete application rewrite aren't the result of the software stack used, but algorithms/data structures/etc. If you are working in polynomial or exponential time/space it doesn't matter what language/framework/etc you use, your scaling capability will be limited. In my experience, if you set things up properly the only part of the server side stack that is unavoidably difficult to transition is the underlying data management layer. If you have good examples (outside of latency constrained applications like multi-player gaming and finance) where a decoupled micro-service architecture would need to be completely rewritten (rather than just rewriting hot services/aggressively caching), I'd love to hear them.
    - blub 11y ago
      I don't see how that would work. Picking the wrong algorithm will almost never result in a rewrite of the whole app, unless the entire app consists of just one algorithm or someone has consistently failed to pick efficient algorithms. What do you do if you wrote your app in Python and you need high-performance multi-threading? What do you do if you chose Java and your heap is way too big? Get ready for a lot of pain, that's what.

melling 11y ago

Objective C has fallen much more than Swift has risen. Is iOS development falling off?

icpmacdo 11y ago
Finding resources to learn modern ios development in objective c is no longer possible
hlfcoding 11y ago
If you look at NSHipster and other sources in the iOS community converting their code samples to Swift only months after its initial release in 2014, it says something about the pent-up demand for a nicer language than ObjC. Plus Swift seems to be designed for ObjC devs to have an easy transition, although slightly less dynamic (and unsafe). Demand for iOS development could be tapering due to app market saturation; saw a post recently around here about that.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

k__ 11y ago

So Swift replaced Objective-C? A friend of mine, who was a iOS dev from the beginning told me about this, but I didn't imagine it going so fast. He's a bit sad about this, because he did a few years of web stuff and wanted to switch back to mobile, now he fears his Objective-C skills are wasted.

melling 11y ago
Programming in iOS is more about knowing the API's. Switching from Objective C to Swift is not difficult. With Swift there's actually less code to write. Compare the snippets in this blog: https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/should-i-use-objective-c-or-swift-for-writing-ios-apps/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/should-i-use-objecti...

SimeVidas 11y ago

And HTML pretty much includes JavaScript.

kalefranz 11y ago

Either the reporter or the Toptal report itself conflate percentage growth with absolute usage. Sure Swift has had huge growth--it's coming from nothing. JVM and python have huge market share; their numbers are just saturated and mature probably.