
2019's Fastest Growing Programming Language Was C, Says Tiobe - baybal2
http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/pJNxybsNjao/2019s-fastest-growing-programming-language-was-c-says-tiobe
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ncmncm
Tiobe again.

Things just do not flip-flop that much in the programming world. What does
happen is the indicators Tiobe uses are unreliable, seemingly selected as
giving the most churn.

Generally almost any measure is more reliable than Tiobe.

We _can_ say reliably that attendance at costly C++ conferences is soaring.
New such conferences are appearing frequently. Each ISO C++ Standard meeting
has had higher attendance than any previous one, for the past few years.

~~~
coldtea
> _Things just do not flip-flop that much in the programming world._

Don't they? I've seen hypes come and go every 3-6 years for 3 decades now (and
I'm sure before that). Let's take web programming:

1996+ - Perl (is where it's at)

2000+ - PHP for the masses and JSP/Servlets for the enterprise

2006+ - Rails (remember when every second job posting was for RoR?)

2013+ - Node

~~~
ksec
> Let's take web programming:

I think that is specific to web programming. I wonder what is the trend after
Node? Since Node's hype seems to have finally died out.

Apart from Perl in the table above, PHP Laravel, Ruby Rails, JS Node seems to
each hold on its own.

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clktmr
Despite all of its limitations, C still has no viable alternatives in many
areas.

And personally I now really appreciate the persistence of C in contrast to all
the changes and new features in other languages.

~~~
ncmncm
There is literally no place where C has no viable alternative.

~~~
coldtea
If you take account quality and maturity of compilers, number of alternative
implementations, support, quality of tooling, availability of architectures,
number of practicing programmers, libs, existing interfaces and OSes
supporting it, and so on, there are tons of places...

~~~
ncmncm
There are many languages that can be transcribed to C. So, if you have C, you
have every other such language, only a makefile entry away.

Furthermore most environments that seem to have only C are a Gcc target, and
then you have access to all the other languages Gcc can compile, without a
detour to C.

~~~
clktmr
Even if it's possible, the change is not worth it.

Transcribing leads to a horrible debug experience. Immature languages
maintained by a single/few are a no-go. Your team already knows C and is good
at it, finding new programmers is easy.

You don't want another language, even if it's supported by GCC. If you want
anything from C, then it's more safety guarantees. And C is flexible enough to
run a better type system on top of it, e.g. look at what the kernel community
is doing with `sparse`.

~~~
ncmncm
If you want to use C, use C.

But to insist there is no alternative is just untrue, and (after you have been
corrected) dishonest.

~~~
clktmr
We were talking about _viable_ alternatives.

~~~
ncmncm
As I said.

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nickysielicki
I mean I buy the argument, a lot of people are trying to make things in that
space and a lot of people don't know what they're doing, so they find
themselves using Keil or the Arduino IDE and so they're writing C99 because it
gets them from zero to one. But who cares?

Trends among all programmers don't matter. It's much more important to ask
yourself what trends can be observed among prominent top-tier development
teams, and on a timeframe much more than a single year, because those people
do know what they're doing and take a year or two to evaluate languages. I
suspect the list would look a lot different. I can't imagine many teams are
starting new projects today and saying, "You know what went wrong on our last
project? We used C++ instead of C."

My best guess at the fastest growing programming language? Some variant of
RTL. Hardware acceleration is huge right now. It's either that or Rust.

~~~
ncmncm
Meaning Verilog and VHDL?

Rust gets a lot of attention here on HN, and the percentage growth in number
of (non-production) coders, relative to any previous period, is high, but the
absolute numbers are still very, very tiny, whoever you count.

If we count new production coders, any growing, established language is adding
enormously more. C++, Javascript, maybe C#. The most surprising of these is
C++, because it should already have penetrated everywhere it was viable, but
paid conference attendance doesn't lie.

And, yes, Verilog etc. are probably adding quite a lot more than a year ago,
again relatively.

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elfexec
I find it hard to believe that the language with the fastest growth rate is a
major established language like C with a large user base.

Fastest growth rates usually come from new languages with hype. A language
which grows from 1 user to 10,000 has a growth rate that is impossible for C
to match.

