
2017 Top Programming Languages - julenx
http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programming-languages-2017
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myth_drannon
duplicate of yesterday's post
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14811321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14811321)

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threepipeproblm
I love Haskell, but... Haskell is about as popular as SQL? That makes no
sense.

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Double_a_92
In real live people dont care about functional programming...

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threepipeproblm
I 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.

~~~
Double_a_92
Because research teams at huge tech companies totally represent the "real
life" of normal companies.

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threepipeproblm
There 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?

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diego_moita
I 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.

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mirekrusin
Something'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.

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wepple
It'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.

~~~
cmyr
Or 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
Perl was also hit hard by this for awhile as it had its own PerlMonks site
that was where people went until recently.

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anfractuosity
I 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.

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poggi
They have an explanation for that in the full blog post
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-2017-top-
pro...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-2017-top-programming-
languages):

"(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.)"

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shuntress
>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.

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bpyne
I 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.

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yellowapple
The fact that the Trending chart lists COBOL at all, let alone as high as 30th
place, seems very peculiar.

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JoBrad
It's huge in finance.

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rajangdavis
Surprised that Python eclipses everything... or am I reading this wrong?

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uyoakaoma
It depends. If you changed the ranking there are some instances where it is
trailing i.e jobs

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ctz
"Arduino" is a programming language now?

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ratinacage
The 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
The page you linked literally says "programs are written in C/C++".

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melling
Swift is already in the top 10. I don't think it has been widely adopted as a
cross-platform language yet.

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Ingon
I 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.

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FRex
Which 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_lang...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_\(parallel_scripting_language\))

~~~
throwaway7645
Actually 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.

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FRex
I 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
I've never used an Apple device either apart from an iPhone 1 10 years ago and
mostly only program in Python. I hope my post didn't come across as
condescending/combative or in anyway demeaning (hard to tell context in a
post). I was just saying most people on HN wouldn't confuse the 2. Thanks for
pointing out the latter btw (which I'd never heard of before, but looks really
cool). I didn't downvote you btw, just responded.

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davedunkin
Where's Kotlin?

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AdamSC1
The 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.

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logandk
I was hoping to see Elixir on the list, but I suppose it may have been
classified as Erlang?

