Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!goblin3!goblin2!goblin.stu.neva.ru!newsfeed1.swip.net!npeer02.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!spln!extra.newsguy.com!newsp.newsguy.com!news2 From: Michael Wojcik Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: =?UTF-8?B?QW5kcm9pZOKAlFdoeSBEYWx2aWs/?= Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2011 10:05:54 -0400 Organization: Micro Focus Lines: 53 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: pb6896efcfc5b5e97eb85fd8b11f509ed301565838cf98e52.newsdawg.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.23) Gecko/20090812 Thunderbird/2.0.0.23 Mnenhy/0.7.5.0 In-Reply-To: Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:4940 BGB wrote: > > of course, C# is currently up there as well, so it is mostly a battle > between C, C++, Java, and C# for the title of "most widely used > language...". That's a meaningless title unless you define it. Used by the most programmers? Used by the most "applications" (however that would be defined)? Most SLOC or function points or some other dubious code metric? Ever? In the last year, month, week? TIOBE's rankings are suspect, as is their methodology, but at least they have a method - they're not just pulling a list out of their collective ass. FYI, the most recent short-term TIOBE rankings are Java, C, C++, C#, PHP, Objective-C, Python, "(Visual) Basic" (a dubious entry), Perl, and Ruby, in that order.[1] That's for May 2011. (RPG has risen to #20, by the way, from #25 last year. Time for everyone to refresh those RPG skills!) Their long-term data shows Java and C securely holding the top two spots for the past decade. C++ briefly beat C for the #2 spot a couple of times, but it didn't last. But as I noted, the TIOBE rankings are suspect. They're based on things like advertised positions and classes, so they mostly measure demand or perceived demand in various markets. And simplistic interpretations of their data are likely to be misleading. For example, they rank COBOL at #37, well below, say, Logo (#24). (Time to brush up on those Logo skills!) But there are a few billion lines of COBOL application source code still under maintenance. They're rarely touched (indeed, businesses are tremendously wary of touching them), because they encode business rules. But they still exist and the programs compiled from them are still used. Does that mean COBOL is under-ranked? Only if you interpret the TIOBE rankings to mean something other than what they mean. Similarly, we see TIOBE ranks Alice (a language in the ML family) at #35, and PL/I at #42. Alice is free, and comes with a free IDE. The major PL/I implementations - IBM's and ours - are expensive. But we still sell a goodly number of PL/I licenses, and all evidence suggests IBM does too. We don't see PL/I customers rushing to switch to Alice. Or even, say, C, which is more like PL/I and is the #2 language. [1] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University