Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!news.albasani.net!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: BGB Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: =?UTF-8?B?QW5kcm9pZOKAlFdoeSBEYWx2aWs/?= Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2011 13:05:44 -0700 Organization: albasani.net Lines: 91 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: news.albasani.net NbbvDt3Jn8RZLZ0OsCKcRsLLJTZKbIupSe/zQF4+N/vEk8bFY0yAqmXX0fo6cyuZSR8yKihDvubBJFVtaxZ43w== NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2011 20:08:53 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: news.albasani.net; logging-data="6fq+xa+yC523PFd6vJggH7So+kMX4QSJWK+TI5Loz4q+iJoxnh2S9t5XxciATmHV6D8A6Y17yPHd+wXZ9VuPJ4eeVfmgpNAwR+6iQDlNnFDS40S50rfFYt0N8UfYZiPp"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@albasani.net" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110414 Thunderbird/3.1.10 In-Reply-To: Cancel-Lock: sha1:zC8Qwh2l2/LVy5+iGo3sh5R9kgY= Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:4950 On 6/3/2011 7:05 AM, Michael Wojcik wrote: > 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. > but, alas, these measures are probably adequate... if I were to ass-pull a list, mostly from most common personally encountered code, it would likely look more like: C C++ Java Perl Python Bash / Shell-Scripts ... > 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. > my main interpretation is more like: top of the list means top of the list (getting things to the top of a given list is often regarded as a goal in itself, like the "yay, we're number one, in your face, ..." sense); top of the list also means generally most popular languages; languages near the top are more likely to be more "acceptable" to people than those lower on the list; ... > 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. > actually... I had thought they meant Alice in the sense of the CMU+EA thinggy, which involves drag-and-drop to control 3D characters and was meant as a teaching tool... either way, it would be a surprise if it gained a whole lot of status... even more so if people were actually trying to write serious "software" with these drag-and-drop character-control commands... it could make more sense as a storyboarding/pre-vis tool though... but, yeah, if it is some other real programming language, that makes a little more sense... > > [1] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html >