6 ms·

The 2016 Top Programming Languages

101 points by doppp 10y ago

alien3d 10y ago
R more then C#,PHP and JAVASCRIPT. Maybe i'm bit slow latest trend.
- clircle 10y ago
  ?
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  Their criteria is clearly biased in favor of data analysis tools. There's no way a niche language could credibly top C#.
  - Mikeb85 10y ago
    Why not? Every science/statistics/math/finance/economics person I know uses R. Lots of slightly more 'casual' users, but it's gone completely mainstream. Universities around here have it installed on most lab computers. I'm also pleased to see Fortran is still going strong. Great language for crunching numbers.
    - tavert 10y ago
      Modern Fortran gets a bad rap, it's suprisingly good at what it does. I wish there were more than one production quality open-source compiler though.
  - versteegen 10y ago
    R may be niche as a programming language, but it's mainstream as a tool. It's a language used by many, many amateur and non-programmers. There are more people out there that have data to process than there are programmers.
    - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
      At which point they should include Excel formulas and VBA since ladder logic also made the cut. That would be the winner by far.
kragniz 10y ago
Full list here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programming-languages-2016 http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programm...
melling 10y ago
"Swift’s rise is impressive, as it’s jumped five positions to 11th place since last year, when it first entered the rankings" Swift will enter the top 10 next year after more iOS developers finally see it as stable. The big source changes in the upcoming 3.0 have caused a lot of people to wait.
- siquick 10y ago
  Or maybe not if more developers realise they can create the majority of mobile apps in JS using React Native.
  - metasean 10y ago
    .. or Ionic, or Cordova, or PhoneGap.
    - antoniuschan99 10y ago
      Those are just webviews. Nativescript, titanium, xamarin, or qt is where react native would be categorized with
  - antoniuschan99 10y ago
    There was talk about being able to run Swift apps on Android in the future. If it becomes official i think the community around swift would be pretty large.
    - _ZeD_ 10y ago
      About that... Naaa. While i appreciate diversity, this is non gonna happen... Swift is too different to be a serious alternative
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  Well, assuming they leave it alone for a while. Apple has developed a bad habit of abandoning compatibility with their developer tools. While this is somewhat more excusable with Swift, given that it's fairly new, it's pretty annoying to have to (e.g.) basically relearn Xcode from scratch with every major release.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
OneOneOneOne 10y ago
I wonder if Python's rise in popularity has reduced shell scripting? Python has even displaced AWK in my tool use.
- Sukotto 10y ago
  Can you give some brief examples of how you've done that? I wouldn't mind if I never had to use awk again...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - gamegoblin 10y ago
    I admit I have never truly learned awk outside of the most dead simple stuff, but one of the most useful python utilities I have ever written is below. It allows you to use python lambdas on lines of stdin. Example usage is: lambda "x0 + x1 * x2" int int int Code: import sys # libs I use commonly... import random, itertools, re # parse the types of the columns types = map(eval, sys.argv[2:]) # craft a lambda with the args x0, x1, ... xN f = eval("lambda " + ','.join("x"+str(i) for i in xrange(len(types))) + ":" + sys.argv[1]) # apply lambda to stdin, don't print results of None for line in sys.stdin: args = [] for t, e in zip(types, line.strip().split()): args.append(t(e)) result = print f(*args) if result != None: print result Examples: Where data.txt is john doe 37 jane doe 35 jack bob 20 bill bob 40 And I do cat data.txt | lambda "x0 if x2 < 36 else x1" str str int It will output doe jane jack bob You can use this sort of tool for a million things. e.g. sample 1 out of every 1000 lines: lambda "x0 if random.random() <= .001 else None" str It's probably the same power and whatnot as awk, but I know and am much more familiar with python, so it's useful for me.
    - claystu 10y ago
      To accomplish the same thing in awk: $ awk '{if ($3 < 36) print $1; else print $2}' data.txt doe jane jack bob Python has a lot of strengths and is better than awk at a lot of things, but one-liner column based text processing on the command line is literally awk's bread and butter.
guelo 10y ago
It's cool that they let you edit the weights of the data sources in their interactive tool http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programming-languages-2016 http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programm... The top ten languages on HN are C, C++, Assembly, Python, Go, Java, Rust, Swift, D and Lisp.
- imaginenore 10y ago
  No JavaScript? Doesn't sound right.
  - Retra 10y ago
    Nobody talks about JavaScript. It's all "Node React Angular Ember Meteor" and whatnot.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      And that's probably why JS isn't higher... even for internal applications a LOT of UIs are web based these days, which means JS is involved to some extent... and a lot of those frameworks and tool sets are all JS. These days, I'd go so far as to say, if you're doing web anything, you should have some node too, as a significant amount of web tooling is node/js based.
    - smitherfield 10y ago
      Still absolutely no way people talk about D here more than JavaScript. And I imagine the reason assembly scores so high is treating "x86" and "ARM" as keywords, so that raises the question of why "Node React Angular Ember Meteor" etc aren't treated as keywords for JS.
y0ssar1an 10y ago
JavaScript is #8? I think your maths are broken.
- DAddYE 10y ago
  Here to say the same thing. Even C# seems to me pretty odd.
- stevesun21 10y ago
  The part of JavaScript(nodejs) community I cannot enjoy is that too much noise made by this kind of ego/ignorance developers.
  - eagsalazar2 10y ago
    And I hate gnats, fruit flies, and mosquitos!! They irritate the crap out of me!
- irrational 10y ago
  I honestly can't tell if you think it should be higher or lower.
- zik 10y ago
  I think JavaScript is used extensively in web development but almost not at all anywhere else. TIOBE places it at 7th place: http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index RedMonk with its more web-centric focus places it at #1: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/01/14/language-rankings-1-15/ http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/01/14/language-rankings-1-15...
  - bigger_cheese 10y ago
    > I think JavaScript is used extensively in web development but almost not at all anywhere else. This matches my experience I think JavaScript is popular on the internet but within businesses it is much less common. Within my world (Industrial manufacturing) the most frequently used languages at least in my orginization... Control Systems (HMI's, PLCs, Operator Guidance etc): C, C++, A lot of domain specific stuff for PLC's Process Modelling / Engineering Simulation: Fortran, C, C++, some python, some matlab. Scrpting: Perl, VBS, .BAT Analytics / Reporting: SAS, COGNOS, ACCESS (older mostly replaced) Web Apps: Java, ASP (older), Oracle Forms (older) Legacy/Mainframe: PL/1 (rarely touched mostly just runs) In House (business) Apps: Java, C++ (older), VBA (i.e. excel spreadsheets) Intranet: Sharepoint
xlayn 10y ago
C... I have fondness on the time when HP was American... and Motorola... and calculators were meant to last... mechanical keyboards... when things were simple... I tell people that the keyboard... the original mechanical one, just God knows how much money took to be designed... how many thousand hours of trial and error it took to be designed... just to get to hp and their new layouts... (don't make me talk about new thinkpads). Dennis Ritchie was the IBM of programming languages... when fad after fad of JS framework pass, C stands...
- hugozap 10y ago
  >when fad after fad of JS framework pass, C stands Oranges vs apples
- nine_k 10y ago
  Unfortunately I honestly dislike C. It is about as expressive as a "portable assembly language" can be expected to be, it has pretty weird syntax [1], it has neither hygienic macros nor a module system, using "include files" instead. And a bunch of undefined behaviors on top of that. Well, it was the unifying language despite all these shortcomings, because Unix. This is very much like JS is an ugly unifying language of sorts today, because the browser. I very much hope that maybe something like Rust will take the place of the close-to-metal portable language. C made some sense when you had a 16-bit CPU @ 10 MHz and 128 KB of RAM for a development machine, and ed on a teletype as the IDE. Now we can do better. [1]: http://c-faq.com/decl/spiral.anderson.html http://c-faq.com/decl/spiral.anderson.html
iand675 10y ago
The Haskell one is a bit off, honestly. Web development is one of Haskell's stronger areas, and it doesn't event rank for that at all.
- frugalmail 10y ago
  Your comment really surprises me.
ravenstine 10y ago
I don't buy it. Choose any one of the weights and select only web; it'll put either Python or Java at #1 and PHP and JavaScript way below. That just doesn't seem realistic...
- Ologn 10y ago
  I think Java as #1 is realistic. Maybe within the Bay Area it is not #1, but for the past twenty years companies have been putting business logic and code into Java application servers, a lot of which is connected to intranets or the web.
  - Illniyar 10y ago
    I think you are discounting the huge amount of PHP around. It is the single largest presence on the web.
    - 0x6c6f6c 10y ago
      While PHP is very widely used, it depends on the company. We're almost exclusively Java based web environments, outside of a single contracted web server where the dev chose PHP as a location-specific tool. I'm not discounting the validity of anything here, just stating an example.
    - mcosta 10y ago
      Installing wordpress counts?
rbosinger 10y ago
Shouldn't I be seeing tons of job posting for R then? I don't get it.
- saghm 10y ago
  Not necessarily; looking at it another way, having lots of programmers who are interested in R might mean that the job market for them is fairly saturated, meaning recruiters don't have to advertise as much or as long
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  It's worth clicking through to the interactive page that lets you pick different criteria. R is at #6 measured by "trending", but only #12 measured by "jobs" (below assembly). Some of their methodology seems a little handwavy (which to be fair is no different than I've seen with other similar rankings). For instance, the number of questions asked on StackOverflow confounds the popularity of the language with the difficulty/ambiguity/poor documentation of the language (e.g. a poorly-documented language might well result in a disproportionate number of SO questions). Straight Google search results (as opposed to Google Trends, which they also use) would only seem to prove that a language was popular in the past. There are lots of Google search results for the Roman Empire, but that doesn't mean it's still a going concern. :-) CareerBuilder and Dice were headhunter cesspools, the last time I looked at them. I would be very wary of drawing any conclusions about popularity from those (or similar) sites. And so on.
- tzs 10y ago
  It could be that most R programmers have the kind of jobs where the language used is flexible and so might not be mentioned in a job listing. The jobs could be asking for statistical analysts or data scientists, and leave it up to the employee to decide if they want R or SciPy or some C++ toolkit or whatever. Compare to someone looking to hire a web developer. There you are much more likely to need the developer to use specific languages, and so those should be mentioned in the job listing.
jomamaxx 10y ago
It's very misleading. The only reason R is there is because of mentions in research papers which is weighted at 100%. Java is #1 for jobs and StackOverflow. Python and Swift is trending + hackernews mentions. C/C++ are always up there. Javascript is 5 or 6 always. Shouldn't surprise anyone.
boznz 10y ago
My favorite is not even in the top 48. I will have to turn in my Hipster Membership Cards :-)
- dorfsmay 10y ago
  What? I thought hipsters where all about niche unknown things that so much better?
  - eggy 10y ago
    No, hipster is wanting to be seen as being all about niche unknown things, but it's really about jumping on the bandwagon before it overflows. Elixir is pseudo-hipster, LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang)is the true hipster language ;)
dalailambda 10y ago
I'm glad to see D in the top 30, I would love to see it get a hype boost along the lines of Rust/Go, it is a very nice language.
- vram22 10y ago
  Right, it is.
eagsalazar2 10y ago
It is impossible for me to believe that C is the top programming language for mobile development. Are they double counting obj-c or something? Same thing for web although I guess it could be the case that people are using C on a lot of old apps that add up to a significant marketshare? I would still be pretty shocked if that were the case.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
snake117 10y ago
It's unfortunate that Elixir didn't even make it on the list, but then again it's only a few years old and just starting to make a splash, especially with the popularity of the Phoenix framework.
dghant1024 10y ago
C wins because of the firmware installed everywhere on all digital-electronic hardware.
kasbah 10y ago
What the hell is Arduino doing on that list. It's C++ with the Arduino Library.
- guelo 10y ago
  I'm not familiar with it but apparently it's some Processing-based language.
  - kasbah 10y ago
    Nope, it's C++.
eggy 10y ago
J made #44, yipee!
kmiroslav 10y ago
Hard to imagine that R is more popular than Javascript.
okaka 10y ago
R is higher than javascript? I didn't heard it before.
- MagnumOpus 10y ago
  Very different domains. Web and app developers code apps connecting net front ends to databases. JS front end and maybe obj-c/swift/c#/python/ruby/perl for the middle tier. R is domain specific to stats/econometrics/engineering/data analysis. It competes with matlab, c++, maybe fortran and recently python.
doug1001 10y ago
i think a small addition to this chart (but not requiring any data not already gathered) would significantly increase its value and interest. in particular, adding one small column (about the same width as the "Types" column) with a sparkline having five points, connected by a single line and which represents the Spectrum Ranking for the years 2012 - 2016 with this, the reader could see for each language the five-year trend in their Spectrum Index. two languages might be next to each other on this chart, yet one might be trending monotonically downward, while the other might be trending sharply and consistently upward. so for instance, look at places 26 - 29: Rust, Delphi, Fortran, and D. Those are contiguous, hence have similar Spectrum index values, but the shapes of their last-five-year time series are probably quite different (eg, Rust, sharply upward trend, only perhaps slightly flatter for D, essentially flat for fortran, and perhaps downward for delphi).
krazedkrish 10y ago
I hope to see ruby enter the top ten next year. It is still circling around the top ten, being listed in top 20. After using Python, java, bash, lisp, javascripts. I have begun to like ruby. I am sure ruby lovers will grow in future as well, because ruby is so addictive. Java Developers when they learn ruby, I am sure the will switch to JRuby, coding every thing in ruby and compiling them with JRuby to run them in JVM. So, I am hopeful that ruby though not listed in top 10 this year, it will be listed next year.
- stevesun21 10y ago
  I refactored the Ruby code write by other experienced Ruby developers before. And guess why they ask me to do the refactor job for them? Because I know how to write clean and deciplined code learn in Java and C lands. :-)
  - krazedkrish 10y ago
    I believe you. I have faced similar problems like you. Its because ruby is easy to learn for everyone including morons. :D
nocman 10y ago
Couple of things I found amusing: First, the article says "The 2016 Top Programming Languages" (emphasis mine), and yet HTML is on the list -- which is not a programming language, but a markup language. Second, if you decide to ignore this, and see how HTML ranks, and turn off everything but the "Web" types, HTML ranks #8 (behind Java, Python, C#, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, and Go). OK, I know, I'm easily amused :-D
- xellisx 10y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A2mWqLUpzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A2mWqLUpzw
  - nocman 10y ago
    I agree with many of the comments on that video. By that line of reasoning almost any kind of formatted data could be considered a "programming language". I'm not buying it. I think there is a valuable distinction between a programming language and a markup language. HTML is not a programming language, it's a markup language (hence the last two letters of its name).

101 points by doppp 10y ago

alien3d 10y ago

R more then C#,PHP and JAVASCRIPT. Maybe i'm bit slow latest trend.

clircle 10y ago
?
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
Their criteria is clearly biased in favor of data analysis tools. There's no way a niche language could credibly top C#.
- Mikeb85 10y ago
  Why not? Every science/statistics/math/finance/economics person I know uses R. Lots of slightly more 'casual' users, but it's gone completely mainstream. Universities around here have it installed on most lab computers. I'm also pleased to see Fortran is still going strong. Great language for crunching numbers.
  - tavert 10y ago
    Modern Fortran gets a bad rap, it's suprisingly good at what it does. I wish there were more than one production quality open-source compiler though.
- versteegen 10y ago
  R may be niche as a programming language, but it's mainstream as a tool. It's a language used by many, many amateur and non-programmers. There are more people out there that have data to process than there are programmers.
  - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
    At which point they should include Excel formulas and VBA since ladder logic also made the cut. That would be the winner by far.

kragniz 10y ago

Full list here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programming-languages-2016 http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programm...

melling 10y ago

"Swift’s rise is impressive, as it’s jumped five positions to 11th place since last year, when it first entered the rankings" Swift will enter the top 10 next year after more iOS developers finally see it as stable. The big source changes in the upcoming 3.0 have caused a lot of people to wait.

siquick 10y ago
Or maybe not if more developers realise they can create the majority of mobile apps in JS using React Native.
- metasean 10y ago
  .. or Ionic, or Cordova, or PhoneGap.
  - antoniuschan99 10y ago
    Those are just webviews. Nativescript, titanium, xamarin, or qt is where react native would be categorized with
- antoniuschan99 10y ago
  There was talk about being able to run Swift apps on Android in the future. If it becomes official i think the community around swift would be pretty large.
  - _ZeD_ 10y ago
    About that... Naaa. While i appreciate diversity, this is non gonna happen... Swift is too different to be a serious alternative
Turing_Machine 10y ago
Well, assuming they leave it alone for a while. Apple has developed a bad habit of abandoning compatibility with their developer tools. While this is somewhat more excusable with Swift, given that it's fairly new, it's pretty annoying to have to (e.g.) basically relearn Xcode from scratch with every major release.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

OneOneOneOne 10y ago

I wonder if Python's rise in popularity has reduced shell scripting? Python has even displaced AWK in my tool use.

Sukotto 10y ago
Can you give some brief examples of how you've done that? I wouldn't mind if I never had to use awk again...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- gamegoblin 10y ago
  I admit I have never truly learned awk outside of the most dead simple stuff, but one of the most useful python utilities I have ever written is below. It allows you to use python lambdas on lines of stdin. Example usage is: lambda "x0 + x1 * x2" int int int Code: import sys # libs I use commonly... import random, itertools, re # parse the types of the columns types = map(eval, sys.argv[2:]) # craft a lambda with the args x0, x1, ... xN f = eval("lambda " + ','.join("x"+str(i) for i in xrange(len(types))) + ":" + sys.argv[1]) # apply lambda to stdin, don't print results of None for line in sys.stdin: args = [] for t, e in zip(types, line.strip().split()): args.append(t(e)) result = print f(*args) if result != None: print result Examples: Where data.txt is john doe 37 jane doe 35 jack bob 20 bill bob 40 And I do cat data.txt | lambda "x0 if x2 < 36 else x1" str str int It will output doe jane jack bob You can use this sort of tool for a million things. e.g. sample 1 out of every 1000 lines: lambda "x0 if random.random() <= .001 else None" str It's probably the same power and whatnot as awk, but I know and am much more familiar with python, so it's useful for me.
  - claystu 10y ago
    To accomplish the same thing in awk: $ awk '{if ($3 < 36) print $1; else print $2}' data.txt doe jane jack bob Python has a lot of strengths and is better than awk at a lot of things, but one-liner column based text processing on the command line is literally awk's bread and butter.

guelo 10y ago

It's cool that they let you edit the weights of the data sources in their interactive tool http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programming-languages-2016 http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programm... The top ten languages on HN are C, C++, Assembly, Python, Go, Java, Rust, Swift, D and Lisp.

imaginenore 10y ago
No JavaScript? Doesn't sound right.
- Retra 10y ago
  Nobody talks about JavaScript. It's all "Node React Angular Ember Meteor" and whatnot.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    And that's probably why JS isn't higher... even for internal applications a LOT of UIs are web based these days, which means JS is involved to some extent... and a lot of those frameworks and tool sets are all JS. These days, I'd go so far as to say, if you're doing web anything, you should have some node too, as a significant amount of web tooling is node/js based.
  - smitherfield 10y ago
    Still absolutely no way people talk about D here more than JavaScript. And I imagine the reason assembly scores so high is treating "x86" and "ARM" as keywords, so that raises the question of why "Node React Angular Ember Meteor" etc aren't treated as keywords for JS.

y0ssar1an 10y ago

JavaScript is #8? I think your maths are broken.

DAddYE 10y ago
Here to say the same thing. Even C# seems to me pretty odd.
stevesun21 10y ago
The part of JavaScript(nodejs) community I cannot enjoy is that too much noise made by this kind of ego/ignorance developers.
- eagsalazar2 10y ago
  And I hate gnats, fruit flies, and mosquitos!! They irritate the crap out of me!
irrational 10y ago
I honestly can't tell if you think it should be higher or lower.
zik 10y ago
I think JavaScript is used extensively in web development but almost not at all anywhere else. TIOBE places it at 7th place: http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index RedMonk with its more web-centric focus places it at #1: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/01/14/language-rankings-1-15/ http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/01/14/language-rankings-1-15...
- bigger_cheese 10y ago
  > I think JavaScript is used extensively in web development but almost not at all anywhere else. This matches my experience I think JavaScript is popular on the internet but within businesses it is much less common. Within my world (Industrial manufacturing) the most frequently used languages at least in my orginization... Control Systems (HMI's, PLCs, Operator Guidance etc): C, C++, A lot of domain specific stuff for PLC's Process Modelling / Engineering Simulation: Fortran, C, C++, some python, some matlab. Scrpting: Perl, VBS, .BAT Analytics / Reporting: SAS, COGNOS, ACCESS (older mostly replaced) Web Apps: Java, ASP (older), Oracle Forms (older) Legacy/Mainframe: PL/1 (rarely touched mostly just runs) In House (business) Apps: Java, C++ (older), VBA (i.e. excel spreadsheets) Intranet: Sharepoint

xlayn 10y ago

C... I have fondness on the time when HP was American... and Motorola... and calculators were meant to last... mechanical keyboards... when things were simple... I tell people that the keyboard... the original mechanical one, just God knows how much money took to be designed... how many thousand hours of trial and error it took to be designed... just to get to hp and their new layouts... (don't make me talk about new thinkpads). Dennis Ritchie was the IBM of programming languages... when fad after fad of JS framework pass, C stands...

hugozap 10y ago
>when fad after fad of JS framework pass, C stands Oranges vs apples
nine_k 10y ago
Unfortunately I honestly dislike C. It is about as expressive as a "portable assembly language" can be expected to be, it has pretty weird syntax [1], it has neither hygienic macros nor a module system, using "include files" instead. And a bunch of undefined behaviors on top of that. Well, it was the unifying language despite all these shortcomings, because Unix. This is very much like JS is an ugly unifying language of sorts today, because the browser. I very much hope that maybe something like Rust will take the place of the close-to-metal portable language. C made some sense when you had a 16-bit CPU @ 10 MHz and 128 KB of RAM for a development machine, and ed on a teletype as the IDE. Now we can do better. [1]: http://c-faq.com/decl/spiral.anderson.html http://c-faq.com/decl/spiral.anderson.html

iand675 10y ago

The Haskell one is a bit off, honestly. Web development is one of Haskell's stronger areas, and it doesn't event rank for that at all.

frugalmail 10y ago
Your comment really surprises me.

ravenstine 10y ago

I don't buy it. Choose any one of the weights and select only web; it'll put either Python or Java at #1 and PHP and JavaScript way below. That just doesn't seem realistic...

Ologn 10y ago
I think Java as #1 is realistic. Maybe within the Bay Area it is not #1, but for the past twenty years companies have been putting business logic and code into Java application servers, a lot of which is connected to intranets or the web.
- Illniyar 10y ago
  I think you are discounting the huge amount of PHP around. It is the single largest presence on the web.
  - 0x6c6f6c 10y ago
    While PHP is very widely used, it depends on the company. We're almost exclusively Java based web environments, outside of a single contracted web server where the dev chose PHP as a location-specific tool. I'm not discounting the validity of anything here, just stating an example.
  - mcosta 10y ago
    Installing wordpress counts?

rbosinger 10y ago

Shouldn't I be seeing tons of job posting for R then? I don't get it.

saghm 10y ago
Not necessarily; looking at it another way, having lots of programmers who are interested in R might mean that the job market for them is fairly saturated, meaning recruiters don't have to advertise as much or as long
Turing_Machine 10y ago
It's worth clicking through to the interactive page that lets you pick different criteria. R is at #6 measured by "trending", but only #12 measured by "jobs" (below assembly). Some of their methodology seems a little handwavy (which to be fair is no different than I've seen with other similar rankings). For instance, the number of questions asked on StackOverflow confounds the popularity of the language with the difficulty/ambiguity/poor documentation of the language (e.g. a poorly-documented language might well result in a disproportionate number of SO questions). Straight Google search results (as opposed to Google Trends, which they also use) would only seem to prove that a language was popular in the past. There are lots of Google search results for the Roman Empire, but that doesn't mean it's still a going concern. :-) CareerBuilder and Dice were headhunter cesspools, the last time I looked at them. I would be very wary of drawing any conclusions about popularity from those (or similar) sites. And so on.
tzs 10y ago
It could be that most R programmers have the kind of jobs where the language used is flexible and so might not be mentioned in a job listing. The jobs could be asking for statistical analysts or data scientists, and leave it up to the employee to decide if they want R or SciPy or some C++ toolkit or whatever. Compare to someone looking to hire a web developer. There you are much more likely to need the developer to use specific languages, and so those should be mentioned in the job listing.

jomamaxx 10y ago

It's very misleading. The only reason R is there is because of mentions in research papers which is weighted at 100%. Java is #1 for jobs and StackOverflow. Python and Swift is trending + hackernews mentions. C/C++ are always up there. Javascript is 5 or 6 always. Shouldn't surprise anyone.

boznz 10y ago

My favorite is not even in the top 48. I will have to turn in my Hipster Membership Cards :-)

dorfsmay 10y ago
What? I thought hipsters where all about niche unknown things that so much better?
- eggy 10y ago
  No, hipster is wanting to be seen as being all about niche unknown things, but it's really about jumping on the bandwagon before it overflows. Elixir is pseudo-hipster, LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang)is the true hipster language ;)

dalailambda 10y ago

I'm glad to see D in the top 30, I would love to see it get a hype boost along the lines of Rust/Go, it is a very nice language.

vram22 10y ago
Right, it is.

eagsalazar2 10y ago

It is impossible for me to believe that C is the top programming language for mobile development. Are they double counting obj-c or something? Same thing for web although I guess it could be the case that people are using C on a lot of old apps that add up to a significant marketshare? I would still be pretty shocked if that were the case.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

snake117 10y ago

It's unfortunate that Elixir didn't even make it on the list, but then again it's only a few years old and just starting to make a splash, especially with the popularity of the Phoenix framework.

dghant1024 10y ago

C wins because of the firmware installed everywhere on all digital-electronic hardware.

kasbah 10y ago

What the hell is Arduino doing on that list. It's C++ with the Arduino Library.

guelo 10y ago
I'm not familiar with it but apparently it's some Processing-based language.
- kasbah 10y ago
  Nope, it's C++.

eggy 10y ago

J made #44, yipee!

kmiroslav 10y ago

Hard to imagine that R is more popular than Javascript.

okaka 10y ago

R is higher than javascript? I didn't heard it before.

MagnumOpus 10y ago
Very different domains. Web and app developers code apps connecting net front ends to databases. JS front end and maybe obj-c/swift/c#/python/ruby/perl for the middle tier. R is domain specific to stats/econometrics/engineering/data analysis. It competes with matlab, c++, maybe fortran and recently python.

doug1001 10y ago

i think a small addition to this chart (but not requiring any data not already gathered) would significantly increase its value and interest. in particular, adding one small column (about the same width as the "Types" column) with a sparkline having five points, connected by a single line and which represents the Spectrum Ranking for the years 2012 - 2016 with this, the reader could see for each language the five-year trend in their Spectrum Index. two languages might be next to each other on this chart, yet one might be trending monotonically downward, while the other might be trending sharply and consistently upward. so for instance, look at places 26 - 29: Rust, Delphi, Fortran, and D. Those are contiguous, hence have similar Spectrum index values, but the shapes of their last-five-year time series are probably quite different (eg, Rust, sharply upward trend, only perhaps slightly flatter for D, essentially flat for fortran, and perhaps downward for delphi).

krazedkrish 10y ago

I hope to see ruby enter the top ten next year. It is still circling around the top ten, being listed in top 20. After using Python, java, bash, lisp, javascripts. I have begun to like ruby. I am sure ruby lovers will grow in future as well, because ruby is so addictive. Java Developers when they learn ruby, I am sure the will switch to JRuby, coding every thing in ruby and compiling them with JRuby to run them in JVM. So, I am hopeful that ruby though not listed in top 10 this year, it will be listed next year.

stevesun21 10y ago
I refactored the Ruby code write by other experienced Ruby developers before. And guess why they ask me to do the refactor job for them? Because I know how to write clean and deciplined code learn in Java and C lands. :-)
- krazedkrish 10y ago
  I believe you. I have faced similar problems like you. Its because ruby is easy to learn for everyone including morons. :D

nocman 10y ago

Couple of things I found amusing: First, the article says "The 2016 Top Programming Languages" (emphasis mine), and yet HTML is on the list -- which is not a programming language, but a markup language. Second, if you decide to ignore this, and see how HTML ranks, and turn off everything but the "Web" types, HTML ranks #8 (behind Java, Python, C#, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, and Go). OK, I know, I'm easily amused :-D

xellisx 10y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A2mWqLUpzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A2mWqLUpzw
- nocman 10y ago
  I agree with many of the comments on that video. By that line of reasoning almost any kind of formatted data could be considered a "programming language". I'm not buying it. I think there is a valuable distinction between a programming language and a markup language. HTML is not a programming language, it's a markup language (hence the last two letters of its name).