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TIOBE : C overtakes Java as the No.1 programming language

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Re: TIOBE : C overtakes Java as the No.1 programming language

#11

Post by bad_user »

apl wrote: post #2

So Scala ranks behind the Lego Mindstorms language and Visual FoxPro in terms of community popularity? Sure thing. I know that valid results don't always conform to expectations, anecdotal evidence and intuition; there's a believability limit, though, which is being crossed here. TIOBE may be measuring its thing correctly , but in that case it's measuring the wrong thing.

The TIOBE index is measuring the hits these languages get on Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, YouTube and other search engines.

See: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_d...

It's easy to see how this measures the wrong thing. A better metric for me is the popularity of languages in open-source software, which could be measured by (say) the number of popular/active projects.

For instance take a look at: https://github.com/languages ... but this also has flaws, because GitHub is favored in the Javascript/Ruby communities and open-source C#/.NET projects end up mostly on CodePlex, a lot of Java projects are hosted by Apache, a lot of Python projects are on BitBucket and so on.

So a better metric would be to aggregate the projects from all popular project hosting services and count them, with some kind of weight attached. So for instance it would be unfair to count the lines of code in the Linux kernel, but it would also be unfair for the Linux kernel to have the same weight as some random project on GitHub that's being watched by 5 people. I would make this weight proportional to the number of active contributers, such that when a project is left unmaintained its weight will eventually drop to zero.

Re: TIOBE : C overtakes Java as the No.1 programming language

#12

Post by tosseraccount »

Aedan wrote: post #10

Excuse my apparent ignorance, but people are still programming in C? Why? On which fields? Is there something C can do better than Java or C#?

You're favorite virtual machine and OS are probably written in C (or some dialect thereof).

Re: TIOBE : C overtakes Java as the No.1 programming language

#13

Post by apl »

nknight wrote: post #5
apl wrote: post #2

So Scala ranks behind the Lego Mindstorms language and Visual FoxPro in terms of community popularity? Sure thing. I know that valid results don't always conform to expectations, anecdotal evidence and intuition; there's a believability limit, though, which is being crossed here. TIOBE may be measuring its thing correctly , but in that case it's measuring the wrong thing.

It would strongly violate my expectations for Scala to be more popular than LabVIEW (which is NOT just "the Lego Mindstorms language") or Visual FoxPro. The "community" they're measuring is not the HN community, which is not even close to a representative sample of engineers worldwide.

  > It would strongly violate my expectations for Scala to be
  > more popular than LabVIEW (which is NOT just "the Lego
  > Mindstorms language")
I'm not talking about LabView; it's literally the Lego Mindstorms language [1] that outranks Erlang, MATLAB, ActionScript, Scheme, Groovy, R, Scala, and so Forth. LabView appears in the "Can't compare that meaningfully" category. So consider your expectations violated.

  > The "community" they're measuring is not the HN
  > community, which is not even close to a representative
  > sample of engineers worldwide.
I understand the potential bubble effects at work. I'm not arguing that Scala or Clojure or whatever's hip should come out on top. What I'm contesting is their notion of popularity. The measurements may be reliable (I don't think they are), but they're sure as hell not measuring anything worthwhile. NXT-G may be more "popular" in the sense of being Googled more often, but that's utterly irrelevant for 99% of all cases where you'd be interested in language popularity.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms_NXT#NXT-G

Re: TIOBE : C overtakes Java as the No.1 programming language

#14

Post by buro9 »

mrcharles wrote: post #6

Their methodology is suspect as hell: "TIOBE Programming Community Index is an indicator of the programming language trends. It is updated monthly, this list is based on the number of experienced programmers,courses and third-party vendors on the Internet. It uses the well-known search engines (such as Google, MSN, Yahoo) as well as Wikipedia and YouTube to calculate the ranking." Frankly that doesn't sound like a pr…

It is meant to be nothing but a trend indicator. Taken as such, and knowing that the methodology they use is flawed but mostly constant, then it actually works OK.

Re: TIOBE : C overtakes Java as the No.1 programming language

#16

Post by ajb »

Aedan wrote: post #10

Excuse my apparent ignorance, but people are still programming in C? Why? On which fields? Is there something C can do better than Java or C#?

Java and C# have 'managed' runtimes; it the language manages memory for you. This memory management bit cannot itself be written in the 'managed' language. Also, an operating system can't either[1].

Also, systems with hard real time requirements, such as audio/video, the signal processing code in your phone, wifi router, etc, are incompatible with almost all managed runtimes.

[1] Okay, I know there are academic ones that are. As far as I know, no productions systems are.

Re: TIOBE : C overtakes Java as the No.1 programming language

#17

Post by jgw »

Aedan wrote: post #10

Excuse my apparent ignorance, but people are still programming in C? Why? On which fields? Is there something C can do better than Java or C#?

Linux, UNIX variants, all their drivers, tons of embedded software & firmware in tiny devices like wireless chipsets, all the way up to the "real" IOS that runs Cisco switches.

It's a good option for low-level work.

Re: TIOBE : C overtakes Java as the No.1 programming language

#18

Post by krollew »

I think that there is no need to check popularity of C and compare it to other ones. Even if C isn't most often used programming language anymore, it is and will be programming language number 1. Most popular languages are not realy different from C. Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Lisp - ok. those languages are different, OK. But C++, C# and Java are just C made bit more convienient tool for object oriented programming. Morover, if it isn't enough so much currently used software is written in C. Yeah, no doubt that C is programming language number 1.

Re: TIOBE : C overtakes Java as the No.1 programming language

#19

Post by w0utert »

Aedan wrote: post #10

Excuse my apparent ignorance, but people are still programming in C? Why? On which fields? Is there something C can do better than Java or C#?

Embedded, low power, real-time, drivers, high performance computing, low-level kernel, legacy, and so on...

The alternatives you give are not really the best examples either. C# is only a viable development platform for serious/professional work if you're targeting Windows, and if there is one language that doesn't do anything better than the many alternatives that compare favorably to it, it would be Java.

Re: TIOBE : C overtakes Java as the No.1 programming language

#20

Post by ncarlson »

Aedan wrote: post #10

Excuse my apparent ignorance, but people are still programming in C? Why? On which fields? Is there something C can do better than Java or C#?

Most cross-platform libraries are written in C. Consider the multitude of C libraries that are available in Python or Ruby.
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