this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
82 points (87.3% liked)

Programming

17313 readers
239 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
82
Python is still the most popular coding language, but challengers are gaining ground (www.techspot.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The latest update to the TIOBE Index reveals notable shifts in the world of software development. While traditional programming languages remain popular, many developers are seeking out technologies that can make sense of the vast amounts of modern digital data. Legacy languages like C, COBOL, Fortran, and Assembly still have their place, but they no longer take center stage.

all 21 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 44 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (7 children)

I really wonder about their methodology. JavaScript/Typescript is nearly ubiquitous in webdev, and has been making strides in the backend space for almost a decade now. No matter how you feel about it (yeah it's terrible, I've been press-ganged into it this year) it's a real force in the marketplace.

It's super surprising to me it's still behind C and C++.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The fact that the scratch language is in the top 20 should tell you how seriously you should take this metric. TIOBE measures the number of search hits mentioning the language. So a language that is popular with learners, or that has poor documentation and thus requires a lot of third party documentation, or that it is profitable to run ads next to will all be inflated.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I personally think the advertising bump is why matlab is on there. Matlab programmers are the kind of dingleberries that love to pay for something that everyone else uses a foss alternative for.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

Lol I love the unfiltered shade

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Some places are inextricably tied to SimuLink due to how long it was around before any of the alternatives.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

C/C++ still has a huge place in firmware, microcontrollers, operating systems, drivers, application development, video games, real-time systems and so on. It's a totally different space of programming to webdev, which might explain the surprise.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

No! C is legacy! No one uses it anymore! It's too hard!

/s

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I mean it's not hard so much as very dated and a bit shit.

I could use raw pointers in c# if I wanted to. But it's just not a great way to do things.

C will likely have a place where low languages are required for a long time. But everywhere else there's little reason to choose over more modern languages.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

I'm not really a webdev, more backend or full stack at this point. I do know about C & C++ strong presence in firmware, OS, HPC, video gaming, and elsewhere.

But by the numbers there's a lot more webdevs than any other kind out there, and that doesn't even touch on NodeJS leaking into backend and elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

Not only that, but with toolchains like deno, it's almost enjoyable

I wrote some telegram bots in deno and it's got one of the cleanest deploy chains around, just compile to an executable for the target architecture, and SCP it over. Exec is statically linked, and so it just works

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

There's just such a massive volume of web development compared to systems programming?

[–] Treczoks 3 points 2 weeks ago

I wonder how much of that actually is development and not just the gazillionth instance of some web site builders scripts.

[–] Voytrekk 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Everyone that does frontend works with JS/TS and it's becoming popular on the backend as well. Definitely the most popular language IMO.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago

*in the web dev domain.

Which also has a very disproportionate representation on the web - for obvious reasons. And it is very easy to get stuck in the mentatilty that all you see if the domain you are in so you over estimate how large it is compaired to other domains. But lets not forget general application development, old large scale enterprise, embedded systems, game dev, machine learning and many more spaces where JS/TS are barely used at all.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

A lot of the software that makes JavaScript web development possible is C or C++, like web servers, databases, operating systems, network devices.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Legacy languages like C, COBOL, Fortran, and Assembly still have their place, but they no longer take center stage.

"Legacy" languages?

2nd: C++ 4th: C

Right...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Suppose it depends on the definition of legacy.

I mean new features are still added to C and C++.

But they are old.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

And here I am, only being allowed to program in C99 (or sometimes C89)

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 weeks ago

TIOBE is meaningless - it is just search engine result numbers, which for many search engines are likely a wildly inaccurate estimate of how many results match in their index. Many of those matches will not be about the relevant language, and the numbers probably have very little correlation to who uses it (especially for languages that are single letter, include punctuation in the name, or are a common English word).