
Dr Dobbs - The Rise And Fall of Languages in 2010 - brudgers
http://www.drdobbs.com/visualstudio/229100358
======
w1ntermute
> Over the years, the index has been both praised and vilified. The latter by
> language adherents who are unhappy over the decline of their favorite idiom.

I can't say that I trust TIOBE's methodology (looking at search result
volume), and that's as an ardent Pythonista.

~~~
TomOfTTB
I agree and think this article gives a perfect example of why it isn't
accurate. Why would Javascript fall out of the top 10 last year? It makes no
sense if you trust the methodology. BUT...if you think about it a system that
gives a lot of weight to "mentions" falls apart when frameworks start drawing
attention because it divides the number of mentions (how many times have you
seen a jquery or Sproutcore article that never mentions the word Javascript?).
Hence the drop

~~~
spenrose
I almost sent them a critic-gram about this one, then I stopped and thought. I
suspect their method is measuring _the fraction of JS activity which is self-
perceived as "programming" in the sense of software engineering_. Rightly or
wrongly, laying out pulldown menus with JQuery and the like is broadly (not
universally) perceived as the practice of "design". Surely all of us know that
plenty of echt programming is done in JS, and also plenty of let's-make-this-
widget-dynamic work by people whose skills do not include structuring large
blocks of code. The distinction is not an XOR, but it is both clear and real,
and I believe the Tiobe results reflect it. My further W.A.G. is that their
method under-represents the level of software engineering activity done in JS
relative to, say, Ruby and Python, but that it does so because developers
themselves are lagging in their perceptions.

------
adulau
> "I expect this trend will continue, as I strongly doubt that many new green
> field projects would today choose Perl as the principal development
> language."

Maybe but checking regularly the CPAN recent updates (
<http://search.cpan.org/recent/> ), it seems that Perl is still very active
and especially in the activity of providing API or pipe to other
technologies/libraries.

At the end, large or medium sized projects are using different programming
languages for different tasks and there is no such thing as the "principal
development language". Diversity is great...

~~~
derleth
> Perl is still very active and especially in the activity of providing API or
> pipe to other technologies/libraries.

If Parrot comes to full fruition, CPAN should be available to (at least) both
Ruby and Python about as easily as it's available to Perl.

 _If_ Parrot comes to full fruition.

~~~
draegtun
You can already run _some_ CPAN modules in Rakudo (Perl 6) on Parrot. See
Blizkost (which comes with Rakudo): <https://github.com/jnthn/blizkost>

Here is an example which works (using CGI module from perl5/CPAN):

    
    
        use v6;
        use CGI:from<perl5>;
    
        my $q = CGI.new;
        print $q.header,
            $q.start_html('Hello World'),
            $q.h1('Hello World'),
            $q.end_html;
    

PS. re: _some_ CPAN modules - Only "well behaved" Perl5 modules will work.
I've tried four and got one to work. However this is a good start methinks!

------
51Cards
The biggest thing that draws this into question for me is the fact that Visual
Basic and Javascript supposedly dropped by the similar amounts.... ??

Among a dozen other languages, I still frequently develop in VB as I have a
huge code library for it (crawling back into the 90's) and it still works well
as a general Swiss Army knife tool. I have seen the community plummet though
and of course it's rapidly fading in it's significance.

Javascript however is on a meteoric rise development wise. It seems it is
being adapted to anything possible and I see regular talk of it being used
server side now too.

Yet supposedly they both dropped similar amounts? I'm surprised VB didn't drop
more, and Javascript "dropped" at all.

~~~
Zpirate
Maybe interfacing to javascript libraries has replaced actual new javascript
development and people search for, for instance, "jquery" instead of
javascript.

~~~
moomba
That seems to be the main problems with these metrics. They aren't looking at
the popular libraries that make use of the language. If I search "Android
OpenGL development" it should count as a query directed at Java. This survey
doesn't seem to do that though.

------
noahlt
An intellectual hackers' site like this one tends to be home to people playing
with Scala, Erlang, Haskell, etc. Hacker News in particular was started by
Paul Graham, so its seed community had a significant number of Lisp adherents.
The startup community in general is biased towards dynamic languages, in
particular, Ruby.

All this makes me think that Hacker News readers will tend to be on the
leading edge of language popularity. But it is interesting to see the progress
of mainstream adoption.

~~~
sophacles
I think you're on to something here, at least about the HN community being at
the leading edge of what's cool.

Just anecdotal, but I saw that statement in the article of "python surged" and
had a WTF moment. Just yesterday I was putzing around with python and Fuse to
make a silly filesystem, and found myself thinking "man python should really
stop being my go-to language, it's making me seem so old-fashoned". Lately I
have had a lot of those thoughts about python. It's my trusty language, and
probably my first true love, but this last project and the article was my
"python jumped the shark" moment.

So, the question now is:

I have a crapload of useful tools in python, and I don't want to rewrite them
in other languages - has anyone made serious progress into calling into one
runtime from another? Kind of like the JVM or .Net worlds, but universal?

~~~
philipn
Python "jumped the shark" because more people have started adopting it?

~~~
chromatic
That puts things in perspective, doesn't it? There are buzzworthy languages
and there are languages the rest of the world uses to get things done.

------
brucer
I'm extremely dubious of a metric that claims JavaScript and Delphi have the
same market penetration.

------
nhebb
I guess I'm one of the Tiobe doubters, but I trust the Stack Overflow tag
trends more: [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/23554/tag-trends-
by-...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/23554/tag-trends-by-week)

------
drallison
The article comments with respect to Python: "What is surprising is that
several factors might have argued against a break-out year for Python: Two
incompatible versions of the language and the uncertain fate of the Unladen
Swallow project."

The two "incompatible" versions of Python, presumably Python 2 and Python 3,
is really an indication of the strength and foresight of the Python developers
and users. Python 3 has new features, new libraries, and is missing some of
the cruft of Python 2. I see this a sign of vibrant growth and long term
viability, not of weakness.

The article did not mention the PyPy project, python in python targeting
performance on a par or better than CPython. It's Python 2 compatible at the
moment, and a lovely piece of work. There will be a webcast Stanford talk by
Armin Ringo, one of the developers, on the PyPy system on March 2, 4:15PM
Pacific. <http://ee380.stanford.edu>.

And, frankly, I do not see how the "uncertain fate of the Unladen Swallow
project" has anything to do with the acceptance of Python.

------
alttab
Since a lot of the big technology winners from 2010 were infrastructure plays,
I wonder if back-end still plays more of a role than client interface, which,
putting node and backbone aside, is where most of the JavaScript is written
right now.

------
anodari
Could Python be capturing the dissidents of Java?

------
Zpirate
Three things struck me:

1) The persistence of C. Looks like it will remain "the glue" between the
machine and "higher level" operations for the next decade and beyond. It's
strong niche in the "must be fast as possible and still portable" arena helps,
too.

2) The rise of Python.

3) The decline of VB.

