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2017 Top Programming Languages
- threepipeproblm 9y agoI love Haskell, but... Haskell is about as popular as SQL? That makes no sense.
- arm85 9y agoI noticed that too, I like haskell, but I don't believe it.
- threepipeproblm 9y agoSQL may be an outlier because not that many people refer to themselves as "programming in SQL". Conversely, there are plenty of weekend Haskellers who enjoy discussing it whenever possible.
- hyperpallium 9y agoHow can you tell someone is a Haskeller? Don't worry; they'll tell you.
- Double_a_92 9y agoIn real live people dont care about functional programming...
- threepipeproblm 9y agoI believe that in your real life, they don't. In the bigger picture functional programming has made huge inroads. Facebook has a Haskell team whose product handles up to 1 million requests per second, and it's also in production at AT&T, Microsoft, Google, Barclays, New York Times and many smaller outfits. The other day I read about a Haskell-like language being used for high-speed, low-latency trading for a hedge fund. But there are probably at least 100x more SQL developers out there.
- throwaway7645 9y agoYea because almost all databases use SQL, and zillions of businesses use databases. FP is only a tiny subset of industry coding, but popular in academia and high profile companies.
- Double_a_92 9y agoBecause research teams at huge tech companies totally represent the "real life" of normal companies.
- threepipeproblm 9y agoThere are by far more small companies using Haskell & FP than large ones. I mentioned large companies because they are recognizable. So what is your point?
- adrianN 9y agoThat's because functional programmers are living the dream.
- dna_polymerase 9y agoIs that how data works? "Oh it does not support my feelings so it must be wrong?!" Haskell is nice, granted, but not as popular as you might feel.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI thing GP might have implied the reverse. SQL is to databases what JavaScript is to the web.
- hyperpallium 9y agoPretty sure parent meant SQL is far more popular than Haskell, despite parent's love.
- rajangdavis 9y agoSurprised that Python eclipses everything... or am I reading this wrong?
- uyoakaoma 9y agoIt depends. If you changed the ranking there are some instances where it is trailing i.e jobs
- melling 9y agoSwift is already in the top 10. I don't think it has been widely adopted as a cross-platform language yet.
- Ingon 9y agoI think Swift has the potential (and the chops) to become big. IBM (and a few others) is really pushing hard on adopting it as a server side language, their Ubuntu support is pretty good, but some Windows/Android support will be welcome for sure.
- FRex 9y agoWhich one? There are two languages named Swift: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(parallel_scripting_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(parallel_scripting_lang...
- throwaway7645 9y agoActually 3 if you count SwiftForth, but everyone knows Swift means Apple's new language as realistically nobody has heard of the other two outside small niches.
- FRex 9y agoI never used any Apple device and have no idea how popular Swift is, I also never coded Objective-C despite using C and C++ a lot in my hobby programming. It'd not surprise me that IBM was supporting something niche/enterprise-y though, especially an "implicitly parallel programming language that allows writing scripts that distribute program execution across distributed computing resources,[2] including clusters, clouds, grids, and supercomputers", seems like their thing. Thanks for the downvotes for asking I guess.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
- mirekrusin 9y agoSomething's fishy with this ranking, ie. web-only list has "Processing" before "Clojure", "PHP" before "Ruby" and "Go", for enterprise-only "C" before "Java" - I don't buy it, this data looks like garbage.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- k__ 9y agoyes, looks completely unrepresentative to me
- wepple 9y agoIt's interesting to play with their ranking editor. It really does highlight how variable some of these lists are depending on what you consider to be part of a "top" language. For example, I'd personally completely remove stack overflow questions. It could mean a language is incredibly complex rather than important or commonly used.
- ricksharp 9y agoExcellent point. For example, I almost never need to search or look up documentation for React. But for Angular 2, I can't do anything without looking up the documentation (at least they did an excellent job writing it). So I would say you are right that StackOverflow is a better indicator of complexity than popularity.
- cmyr 9y agoOr it could be that the best resources for information about a specific language exist outside of stackoverflow; I think this is often the case with Rust, for instance, where I will generally turn to users.rust-lang.org, or IRC for questions that I would turn to SO for in other languages; and when I end up googling particular questions I more often end up at somebody's personal blog.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
- diego_moita 9y agoI don't understand these kind of rankings. What are you supposed to conclude from them? My point is that computer programming as an industry is so diverse and complex that these general comparisons become almost useless. Some examples: * If you live in a town with lots of government agencies and big corporations then it is a lot more important to understand some obscure Java or .Net framework than even mainstream languages like C or C++. * If you live in a place with a big financial industry or hardware development then probably understanding the arcane details of C++ and compiler idiosyncrasies is more useful than any web-related language.
- ctz 9y ago"Arduino" is a programming language now?
- ratinacage 9y agoThe name Arduino refers to a platform. This platform has its own programming language. The platform is actually a fork of Wiring[1]. It seems there is really no better name for the language other than "the Arduino language." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiring_(development_platform) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiring_(development_platform)
- ctz 9y agoThe page you linked literally says "programs are written in C/C++".
- yellowapple 9y agoThe fact that the Trending chart lists COBOL at all, let alone as high as 30th place, seems very peculiar.
- JoBrad 9y agoIt's huge in finance.
- anfractuosity 9y agoI don't understand why HTML is in there? I can obviously understand the scripting languages you can embed in HTML being there, but they're listed separately anyway.
- rwj 9y agoThis is a common complaint. It's not mentioned in the interactive chart, but the print article explains their reasoning.
- poggi 9y agoThey have an explanation for that in the full blog post http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-2017-top-programming-languages http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-2017-top-pro...: "(This is a great moment for us to reiterate our response to the complaint of some in years past of “HTML isn’t a programming language, it’s just markup.” At Spectrum, we have a very pragmatic view about what is, and isn’t, a recognizable programming language. HTML is used by coders to instruct computers to do things, so we include it. We don’t insist on, for example, Turing completeness as a threshold for inclusion—and to get really nitpicky, as user Jonny Lin pointed out last year, HTML has grown so complex that when combined with CSS, it is now Turing complete, albeit with a little prodding and requiring an appreciation of cellular automata.)"
- anfractuosity 9y agoCheers, I hadn't seen that.
- shuntress 9y ago>used by coders to instruct computers to do things I get what they are going for and I don't really disagree but by this logic chrome/firefox .exe should probably be the top most widespread programming languages.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- logandk 9y agoI was hoping to see Elixir on the list, but I suppose it may have been classified as Erlang?
- davedunkin 9y agoWhere's Kotlin?
- bpyne 9y agoI wouldn't place a lot of importance in the rankings. Instead of trying to rationalize why your favorite language is not higher/lower than others, figure out the area you like programming in, e.g. higher ed, healthcare, database kernels, machine learning, etc. Then search around for the common tool sets used in that area and get proficient at them.
- myth_drannon 9y agoduplicate of yesterday's post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14811321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14811321
- AdamSC1 9y agoThe reason some people are complaining about this chart is that the weighting of the sources they use seems to bias towards new technologies. They aren't listing this based on a single metric such as 'jobs in this programming language' or 'sites run on this programming language', but more a level of how trendy it is. They have 12 sources scored out of 100, the defaults are: -100 "IEEE Xplore" (Publication): This will bias new popular and emerging languages as a journal is more likely to cover topical interests. -50 "Google Trends" (Trend Tool): Google trends will also bias as the results from the trends tool are relative and not absolute. If "Arduino" leaped up in searches while "PHP" stayed the same, Google Trends would overweight Arduino. -50 "GitHub Active" (Code Repo): This one I'm ok with, but it depends on the definition of active and how much weight is given to the size of the project. Does two projects having at least one commit in 30 days mean that WordPress' PHP repo is just as active as my_fist_Haskell repo? -50 Google (Search): It's unclear what's being measured here, volume of searches? Volume of results? Quality of results? The other consideration is if you know a language well or have sources you trust in that language you might not be searching at all. -30 GitHub Created (Code Repo): I think this is overweighted unless it filters out inactive repos or those with only a readme file? -30 Stack Overflow Views (Q/A Site): This seems like it should be much higher. -30 Stack Overflow Questions (Q/A Site): Unclear if this is questions this year, or questions total. If it is new questions this year that will heavily bias the results to emerging languages. It's also unclear if this counts specialty stack exchanges. -20 Reddit (Social): Seems like a bias sample to include as some projects choose this as their homebase for communication and others don't. -20 HackerNews (Social): We're also realistically a bias sample as we're more likely to talk about trendy languages even if it doesn't have a large following. -20 Twitter (Social): I don't use Twitter enough to comment on this, but I think it is important to define what is being measured here. Raw tweet count? Reach? Engagement? -5 Career Builder (Job Site): ...Why? -5 Dice (Job Site): ...Never heard of it. What's missing? I would have liked to see jobs from LinkedIn, AngelList, Stack Overflow Careers etc included, as well as volumes of subscribers for educational sites like Udacity, Udemy, FreeCodeCamp etc.