6 ms·

Tiobe Index: Go language at all time high and in the top 10

40 points by shime 9y ago

kerkeslager 9y ago
It's a real shame that the programming industry has bought into the Go hype so readily. Don't get me wrong: the design decisions made by the Go team make lots of sense within the context of Google. But the vast majority of programmers don't have Google's problems of scale, and by using Go they give up many benefits of modern type-safe programming languages. There's a method to Google's madness, but for most development teams, adopting Go is imitating the madness without understanding the method. Of course, this is extremely beneficial to Google: they get a community of people developing free libraries for them. But for the rest of us, it's an enormous drain of mindshare that could be devoted to more general-purpose languages.
- curioustom 9y ago
  Honest request - could you list the top benefits of modern languages people are giving up in favor of Go ?
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    Type checking, mainly. Lack of generics makes the type system fairly useless. Go generate works around the code duplication caused by no generics, but exacerbates the debugging problems. This is a tradeoff, increasing bugs and debugging time in exchange for faster compilation. I believe the developers when they say this makes sense in a 1 billion line codebase like Google's, but I've worked on 1 million line codebases and at that size debug time vastly outweighs compilation time in i.e. C#. I'm actually in a good passion to evaluate this because I worked in both C# and Java with and without Generics. Most codebases are far fewer than 1 million lines. There were other big problems with Go last time I checked, but I haven't looked at it much in a while, so I won't venture to say more since those things might have changed.
    - Arzh 9y ago
      Generating the code leads to a lot easier debugging for me. In C++ debugging generics are annoying to put breakpoints in, since it is harder to hit the exact implementation I want (VS has a way to do this but it is a little annoying to get right). I don't mind doing that because all too often I've seen a 'generic' implementation gain more and more flags to make it less and less generic. I've only ever needed to do that a few times, the built in containers cover 95% of what I need. I came to go because I was formulating an opinion of c++, java, javascript etc and they aligned very closely to what the main team of three guys were talking about when they were first releasing it. Most of the time I never scale the application but I still love the way to solve problems in go, especially when I'm doing something in a concurrent manner. I've also had a large (5M+ lines) C++ project that would need to be complied 3-4 times to do things like CI and automated testing. So each build taking 1-1.5 hours, which is not crazy, because of rebuilding code that is static 99% of the time mean that it is worth it to me.
      - kerkeslager 9y ago
        It's 2017. C++ was invented in 1984. Just because a 33-year old language has problems doesn't mean Go is the best solution.
        Arzh 9y ago
        I find that go is the best solution for my problems
      - rbehrends 9y ago
        C++ templates are a very idiosyncratic way of doing parametric polymorphism, and the C/C++ compilation model is even more idiosyncratic. You cannot make general statements about parametric polymorphism based on that.
        Arzh 9y ago
        Everything I said was based on my experience with C++, I was making pointed statements not general ones.
  - di4na 9y ago
    Memory isolation. Goroutines are really a poor man Actor. Error handling and control of the flow. Functions as first class citizens with real closure. Dynamic tracing. Etc etc
    - curioustom 9y ago
      Thanks! Is there a language which mostly has those but also has some of the benefits of Go?
      - di4na 9y ago
        Erlang and Elixir and all languages on the BEAM. Haskell, Ocaml and Rust on recent linux kernel or on freeBSD/Illumos OS. But i do know what are the advantage of Go you want because i personally do not see a lot in it. Different pov i guess.
- ice109 9y ago
  umm I chose go exactly because it has a type system. what's another "modern" type safe language that's as convenient as go? kotlin? c#?
  - boubiyeah 9y ago
    Also: Scala, TypeScript, F#
    - 43224gg252 9y ago
      I've only used Scala and TypeScript. TypeScript is crap compared to Go. It's yet another abstraction layer on top of javascript and it's much slower and even more difficult to program with than Go. There's no point in using TS when Go is there. Scala is yet another language running on a JVM and its syntax is almost as bad and clumsy as Java. Most benchmarks put it on par with Go in terms of performance. I just don't see a point in using these languages when Go is just as capable, more simple, compiled to binaries (and can even run on bare metal in some cases), runs on more platforms, has much better editor support, and is just more fun to use in general.
      - Others 9y ago
        Scala has its problems, but it is not anywhere near as clumsy as Java. Where Scala falls flat is implicitness, an overabundance of features, and extreamly dense syntax for very high levels of abstraction. Its syntax is actually quite nice, with relatively few warts. I find it a joy to write, and very fluid.
        c_shu 9y ago
        Scala is too complicated. It reminds me of C++. But C++ is fast. People use it probably when performance is their first priority. For practical reasons I just bear with C++. Use it as necessary. I would rather not bear with another complicated language, unless there are compelling reasons. I think it's unlikely that Scala can be useful to me in the near future, because there are so many good alternatives.
- hu3 9y ago
  You really think Google's scale actually benefits significantly from comunity libraries? At that scale it must be a nitghmare to use third party code. Hell they even invented their own system programming language.
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    Of course. They don't have to import a library as a package, as most are BSD they can just use the code. And even if they use dependencies, dependency management can be simplified by only importing mature, conservative libraries. Most problems developers have with dependencies are caused by importing every 0.x versioned library in i.e. NPM and plugging together a bunch of buggy leaky abstractions.
- rbehrends 9y ago
  A major reason, in my opinion, is that Go addressed an actual need. And that is providing an imperative, GCed language with native compilation. We've seen some more languages that cover this particular niche in recent years, but they aren't yet mature and/or lack backing. The biggest problem here is garbage collection. Garbage collection (or other forms of automatic memory management) has traditionally been necessary for functional languages and (as a matter of practicality) popular for interpreters and JIT-compiled languages, but has often encountered hostility and rejection among users of imperative, natively compiled languages. Go was simply one of the first languages to hit that niche and reach a sufficient level of maturity. Putting up with Go's idiosyncrasies then became simply a tradeoff.
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    D was fairly mature before Go was invented, so I'd credit Go's success to Google hype rather than the reasons you mentioned.
    - rbehrends 9y ago
      Sorry, D's garbage collector is too limited to qualify. It is a stop-the-world, conservative collector with a history of performance problems [1]. And the fact that D development appears to be focusing on @nogc rather than fixing the GC issues also doesn't help. [1] Such as https://pointersgonewild.com/2014/09/09/ds-garbage-collector-problem/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2014/09/09/ds-garbage-collector...
- bostand 9y ago
  Malware creators have switched to golang because it makes it very easy to write platform independent networked code. You are fighting a lost battle, go has already won
  - lostmsu 9y ago
    AFAIK last week's Petya is in C#.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  I don't think they necessarily have. TIOBE is just a crappy index. PYPL is better: https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html
  - notacoward 9y ago
    I'm not sure that an index based on availability of tutorials is really an improvement. It's explicitly targeting a subset of the whole programming population.
    - crdoconnor 9y ago
      It's based upon volume of searches for tutorials, not availability. It's a leading indicator rather than an overall measure of popularity.
      - notacoward 9y ago
        "Availability of tutorials" vs. "searches for tutorials" doesn't affect the point. It's still selecting a subset of programmers. While it's somewhat useful as a leading indicator of popularity over the next couple of years, it's less so w.r.t. either the present or the further future. I'm not saying it has no value at all, but it's not clearly a substitute - let alone a superior substitute - for surveys that measure other things.
- randomdata 9y ago
  The problem with all those modern type-safe programming languages is that they all use modern programming idioms. In reality, the market just wanted another C, the 2nd place language in this list, without the parts that make it especially dangerous to use. Go came the most close to providing that, and thus it started to see adoption in that market.
kerkeslager 9y ago
Could we change the title to reflect that the link contains a ranked list of programming languages and isn't about Go?
- bostand 9y ago
  Did you even read the article?? Their subtitle is "July headline: Golang at all time high and in top 10"
nickcw 9y ago
Go may not be the language with the most features or have the longest academic pedigree but it is really good for getting stuff done. I think that the problems that Google were trying to solve with go are particularly relevant to the open source community. In particular simplicity encourages more contributors. The way I see it is that the big open source go projects (eg docker, kubernetes, terraform, etc) have made go popular and a good choice for code within companies who now want to hire go engineers. There are lots of little reasons for go's success in the open source world like gofmt, integrated testing, quick compile times, easy to read, godoc, single binary deploy, excellent support on all major platforms etc. In short it is really well engineered. Go projects seem to be really well engineered in general and make for reliable Lego bricks for building bigger things out of. (Go dep and vendoring have helped here.) Personally speaking go brought back the joy of programming for me getting useful stuff done (like rclone) quickly with minimal fuss and maximum reliability. Long may Go continue in the top 10!
shaftoe 9y ago
Delphi is #9? Delphi? Where in the world of software development is Delphi not dead?
- 0xFFC 9y ago
  I think there is something seriously wrong with their ranking, Delphi was 12 in 2016 and it increased its ranking to 9 in 2017? They kidding us. There is no better answer I think. Is there?
- agumonkey 9y ago
  I guess it's a bit like COBOL, it's there, it's kept just enough so it won't die.
- tonyarkles 9y ago
  Banking, for one.
bostand 9y ago
I am really surprised kotlin isn't doing better. What is going on?
notacoward 9y ago
I realize that the authors chose to highlight Go's position, but there are so many more interesting observations that could me made from this list. * Delphi / Object Pascal is still a thing. * Ruby has fallen below Go and even Perl. FFS, it's barely holding on vs. assembly language. * Scratch at #19 makes me happy. * Rust is still far behind Fortran, Ada, and most interestingly D with which it more directly competes.
dgudkov 9y ago
The rise of Scratch is pretty surprising.
watt 9y ago
What is going on there? Java drops 6%, C drops 5%, it's like the whole thing is massively contracting. For JVM Scala, Kotlin and Groovy add up to 1.2% share, while Clojure is not in top 50.
- fredley 9y ago
  > The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. I'm not sure what that means, but I'm skeptical. Java for example shows a steady decline over the whole span of the graph. Then in 2015 it has a massive surge, then in 2016 a massive decline. C shows a similarly enormous decline , of over 50% in 2016. Did the amount of C programmers really drop by half in 2016?
  - Macha 9y ago
    Also, JavaScript is at only 2x it's 2004 figure on the graph.
    - nulldev 9y ago
      That really does stand out. There simply has to be something wrong with their JS numbers.
- Someone 9y ago
  IMO, this list has very low correlation with what programmers spend their time on. Yes, they write "The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors". but effectively count search engine hits on "+foo language" (https://tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/ https://tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definiti...) on quite a few sites, over half of them Google properties, so they probably double-count a lot, and including IMO weird choices such as eBay.com. So, even disregarding the question whether that can lead to ratings "based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors" any tweak Google makes to their search algorithm hugely affects their results.
fulafel 9y ago
Why do people keep munging the name to "Golang"?
- johneth 9y ago
  Because Google decided to name it 'Go', a name that is not very Google-able. People refer to it as 'Golang' so that you can actually find out documentation / support / etc. online.
- w8rbt 9y ago
  https://golang.org/ https://golang.org/
  - dmit 9y ago
    https://dlang.org https://dlang.org https://elixir-lang.org https://elixir-lang.org http://www.groovy-lang.org http://www.groovy-lang.org http://kotlinlang.org http://kotlinlang.org https://nim-lang.org https://nim-lang.org http://racket-lang.org http://racket-lang.org https://www.ruby-lang.org https://www.ruby-lang.org https://www.rust-lang.org https://www.rust-lang.org http://www.scala-lang.org http://www.scala-lang.org =)
    - evincarofautumn 9y ago
      There are a bunch—I’ve even got one for a language with almost no users. Wouldn’t mind a .lang TLD for all things language-related.
- vorg 9y ago
  When there's 2 commonly accepted words to name something, people tend to give different shades of meaning to each word in their minds. To me, Golang is the language spec ("Go language"), whereas Go is the gc implementation (invoked by typing in "go"). Other people probably associate meanings to Golang and Go different to me.
- fiedzia 9y ago
  Because you can then search for it.

40 points by shime 9y ago

It's a real shame that the programming industry has bought into the Go hype so readily. Don't get me wrong: the design decisions made by the Go team make lots of sense within the context of Google. But the vast majority of programmers don't have Google's problems of scale, and by using Go they give up many benefits of modern type-safe programming languages. There's a method to Google's madness, but for most development teams, adopting Go is imitating the madness without understanding the method. Of course, this is extremely beneficial to Google: they get a community of people developing free libraries for them. But for the rest of us, it's an enormous drain of mindshare that could be devoted to more general-purpose languages.

curioustom 9y ago
Honest request - could you list the top benefits of modern languages people are giving up in favor of Go ?
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  Type checking, mainly. Lack of generics makes the type system fairly useless. Go generate works around the code duplication caused by no generics, but exacerbates the debugging problems. This is a tradeoff, increasing bugs and debugging time in exchange for faster compilation. I believe the developers when they say this makes sense in a 1 billion line codebase like Google's, but I've worked on 1 million line codebases and at that size debug time vastly outweighs compilation time in i.e. C#. I'm actually in a good passion to evaluate this because I worked in both C# and Java with and without Generics. Most codebases are far fewer than 1 million lines. There were other big problems with Go last time I checked, but I haven't looked at it much in a while, so I won't venture to say more since those things might have changed.
  - Arzh 9y ago
    Generating the code leads to a lot easier debugging for me. In C++ debugging generics are annoying to put breakpoints in, since it is harder to hit the exact implementation I want (VS has a way to do this but it is a little annoying to get right). I don't mind doing that because all too often I've seen a 'generic' implementation gain more and more flags to make it less and less generic. I've only ever needed to do that a few times, the built in containers cover 95% of what I need. I came to go because I was formulating an opinion of c++, java, javascript etc and they aligned very closely to what the main team of three guys were talking about when they were first releasing it. Most of the time I never scale the application but I still love the way to solve problems in go, especially when I'm doing something in a concurrent manner. I've also had a large (5M+ lines) C++ project that would need to be complied 3-4 times to do things like CI and automated testing. So each build taking 1-1.5 hours, which is not crazy, because of rebuilding code that is static 99% of the time mean that it is worth it to me.
    - kerkeslager 9y ago
      It's 2017. C++ was invented in 1984. Just because a 33-year old language has problems doesn't mean Go is the best solution.
      - Arzh 9y ago
        I find that go is the best solution for my problems
    - rbehrends 9y ago
      C++ templates are a very idiosyncratic way of doing parametric polymorphism, and the C/C++ compilation model is even more idiosyncratic. You cannot make general statements about parametric polymorphism based on that.
      - Arzh 9y ago
        Everything I said was based on my experience with C++, I was making pointed statements not general ones.
- di4na 9y ago
  Memory isolation. Goroutines are really a poor man Actor. Error handling and control of the flow. Functions as first class citizens with real closure. Dynamic tracing. Etc etc
  - curioustom 9y ago
    Thanks! Is there a language which mostly has those but also has some of the benefits of Go?
    - di4na 9y ago
      Erlang and Elixir and all languages on the BEAM. Haskell, Ocaml and Rust on recent linux kernel or on freeBSD/Illumos OS. But i do know what are the advantage of Go you want because i personally do not see a lot in it. Different pov i guess.
ice109 9y ago
umm I chose go exactly because it has a type system. what's another "modern" type safe language that's as convenient as go? kotlin? c#?
- boubiyeah 9y ago
  Also: Scala, TypeScript, F#
  - 43224gg252 9y ago
    I've only used Scala and TypeScript. TypeScript is crap compared to Go. It's yet another abstraction layer on top of javascript and it's much slower and even more difficult to program with than Go. There's no point in using TS when Go is there. Scala is yet another language running on a JVM and its syntax is almost as bad and clumsy as Java. Most benchmarks put it on par with Go in terms of performance. I just don't see a point in using these languages when Go is just as capable, more simple, compiled to binaries (and can even run on bare metal in some cases), runs on more platforms, has much better editor support, and is just more fun to use in general.
    - Others 9y ago
      Scala has its problems, but it is not anywhere near as clumsy as Java. Where Scala falls flat is implicitness, an overabundance of features, and extreamly dense syntax for very high levels of abstraction. Its syntax is actually quite nice, with relatively few warts. I find it a joy to write, and very fluid.
      - c_shu 9y ago
        Scala is too complicated. It reminds me of C++. But C++ is fast. People use it probably when performance is their first priority. For practical reasons I just bear with C++. Use it as necessary. I would rather not bear with another complicated language, unless there are compelling reasons. I think it's unlikely that Scala can be useful to me in the near future, because there are so many good alternatives.
hu3 9y ago
You really think Google's scale actually benefits significantly from comunity libraries? At that scale it must be a nitghmare to use third party code. Hell they even invented their own system programming language.
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  Of course. They don't have to import a library as a package, as most are BSD they can just use the code. And even if they use dependencies, dependency management can be simplified by only importing mature, conservative libraries. Most problems developers have with dependencies are caused by importing every 0.x versioned library in i.e. NPM and plugging together a bunch of buggy leaky abstractions.
rbehrends 9y ago
A major reason, in my opinion, is that Go addressed an actual need. And that is providing an imperative, GCed language with native compilation. We've seen some more languages that cover this particular niche in recent years, but they aren't yet mature and/or lack backing. The biggest problem here is garbage collection. Garbage collection (or other forms of automatic memory management) has traditionally been necessary for functional languages and (as a matter of practicality) popular for interpreters and JIT-compiled languages, but has often encountered hostility and rejection among users of imperative, natively compiled languages. Go was simply one of the first languages to hit that niche and reach a sufficient level of maturity. Putting up with Go's idiosyncrasies then became simply a tradeoff.
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  D was fairly mature before Go was invented, so I'd credit Go's success to Google hype rather than the reasons you mentioned.
  - rbehrends 9y ago
    Sorry, D's garbage collector is too limited to qualify. It is a stop-the-world, conservative collector with a history of performance problems [1]. And the fact that D development appears to be focusing on @nogc rather than fixing the GC issues also doesn't help. [1] Such as https://pointersgonewild.com/2014/09/09/ds-garbage-collector-problem/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2014/09/09/ds-garbage-collector...
bostand 9y ago
Malware creators have switched to golang because it makes it very easy to write platform independent networked code. You are fighting a lost battle, go has already won
- lostmsu 9y ago
  AFAIK last week's Petya is in C#.
crdoconnor 9y ago
I don't think they necessarily have. TIOBE is just a crappy index. PYPL is better: https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html
- notacoward 9y ago
  I'm not sure that an index based on availability of tutorials is really an improvement. It's explicitly targeting a subset of the whole programming population.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    It's based upon volume of searches for tutorials, not availability. It's a leading indicator rather than an overall measure of popularity.
    - notacoward 9y ago
      "Availability of tutorials" vs. "searches for tutorials" doesn't affect the point. It's still selecting a subset of programmers. While it's somewhat useful as a leading indicator of popularity over the next couple of years, it's less so w.r.t. either the present or the further future. I'm not saying it has no value at all, but it's not clearly a substitute - let alone a superior substitute - for surveys that measure other things.
randomdata 9y ago
The problem with all those modern type-safe programming languages is that they all use modern programming idioms. In reality, the market just wanted another C, the 2nd place language in this list, without the parts that make it especially dangerous to use. Go came the most close to providing that, and thus it started to see adoption in that market.

kerkeslager 9y ago

Could we change the title to reflect that the link contains a ranked list of programming languages and isn't about Go?

bostand 9y ago
Did you even read the article?? Their subtitle is "July headline: Golang at all time high and in top 10"

nickcw 9y ago

Go may not be the language with the most features or have the longest academic pedigree but it is really good for getting stuff done. I think that the problems that Google were trying to solve with go are particularly relevant to the open source community. In particular simplicity encourages more contributors. The way I see it is that the big open source go projects (eg docker, kubernetes, terraform, etc) have made go popular and a good choice for code within companies who now want to hire go engineers. There are lots of little reasons for go's success in the open source world like gofmt, integrated testing, quick compile times, easy to read, godoc, single binary deploy, excellent support on all major platforms etc. In short it is really well engineered. Go projects seem to be really well engineered in general and make for reliable Lego bricks for building bigger things out of. (Go dep and vendoring have helped here.) Personally speaking go brought back the joy of programming for me getting useful stuff done (like rclone) quickly with minimal fuss and maximum reliability. Long may Go continue in the top 10!

shaftoe 9y ago

Delphi is #9? Delphi? Where in the world of software development is Delphi not dead?

0xFFC 9y ago
I think there is something seriously wrong with their ranking, Delphi was 12 in 2016 and it increased its ranking to 9 in 2017? They kidding us. There is no better answer I think. Is there?
agumonkey 9y ago
I guess it's a bit like COBOL, it's there, it's kept just enough so it won't die.
tonyarkles 9y ago
Banking, for one.

bostand 9y ago

I am really surprised kotlin isn't doing better. What is going on?

notacoward 9y ago

I realize that the authors chose to highlight Go's position, but there are so many more interesting observations that could me made from this list. * Delphi / Object Pascal is still a thing. * Ruby has fallen below Go and even Perl. FFS, it's barely holding on vs. assembly language. * Scratch at #19 makes me happy. * Rust is still far behind Fortran, Ada, and most interestingly D with which it more directly competes.

dgudkov 9y ago

The rise of Scratch is pretty surprising.

watt 9y ago

What is going on there? Java drops 6%, C drops 5%, it's like the whole thing is massively contracting. For JVM Scala, Kotlin and Groovy add up to 1.2% share, while Clojure is not in top 50.

fredley 9y ago
> The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. I'm not sure what that means, but I'm skeptical. Java for example shows a steady decline over the whole span of the graph. Then in 2015 it has a massive surge, then in 2016 a massive decline. C shows a similarly enormous decline , of over 50% in 2016. Did the amount of C programmers really drop by half in 2016?
- Macha 9y ago
  Also, JavaScript is at only 2x it's 2004 figure on the graph.
  - nulldev 9y ago
    That really does stand out. There simply has to be something wrong with their JS numbers.
Someone 9y ago
IMO, this list has very low correlation with what programmers spend their time on. Yes, they write "The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors". but effectively count search engine hits on "+foo language" (https://tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/ https://tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definiti...) on quite a few sites, over half of them Google properties, so they probably double-count a lot, and including IMO weird choices such as eBay.com. So, even disregarding the question whether that can lead to ratings "based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors" any tweak Google makes to their search algorithm hugely affects their results.

fulafel 9y ago

Why do people keep munging the name to "Golang"?

johneth 9y ago
Because Google decided to name it 'Go', a name that is not very Google-able. People refer to it as 'Golang' so that you can actually find out documentation / support / etc. online.
w8rbt 9y ago
https://golang.org/ https://golang.org/
- dmit 9y ago
  https://dlang.org https://dlang.org https://elixir-lang.org https://elixir-lang.org http://www.groovy-lang.org http://www.groovy-lang.org http://kotlinlang.org http://kotlinlang.org https://nim-lang.org https://nim-lang.org http://racket-lang.org http://racket-lang.org https://www.ruby-lang.org https://www.ruby-lang.org https://www.rust-lang.org https://www.rust-lang.org http://www.scala-lang.org http://www.scala-lang.org =)
  - evincarofautumn 9y ago
    There are a bunch—I’ve even got one for a language with almost no users. Wouldn’t mind a .lang TLD for all things language-related.
vorg 9y ago
When there's 2 commonly accepted words to name something, people tend to give different shades of meaning to each word in their minds. To me, Golang is the language spec ("Go language"), whereas Go is the gc implementation (invoked by typing in "go"). Other people probably associate meanings to Golang and Go different to me.
fiedzia 9y ago
Because you can then search for it.