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Top Programming Languages 2025

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Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#211

Post by BoredPositron »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #145
PaulRobinson wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By far the most useful and helpful is job ads: it literally defines the demand side of the programming language market. Yes, that does not show us how much code is running out there, and some companies might have huge armies with very low churn and so the COBOL stacks in banks don’t show up, but I can’t think of a more useful and directly measurable way of understanding a languages real utility.

Yes to your point, COBOL which ranks very low here is still fundamental to the infrastructure of several major industries, with some sources [1] reporting that it is used in: 43% of all banking systems. 95% of all US ATM transactions. 80% of all in-person credit card transactions. 96% of travel bookings. This may very well dramatically change in the next few years with such an emphasis on enterprise AI tools to rewri…

I can only speak to the two bigger German banks (i.e., Sparkasse and VR banks), but if you look at their outsourced development providers (Atruvia and Sparkasse Informatik), they're still offering incentives for their apprentices to learn COBOL, especially in the german dual apprenticeship programs which they can steer more easily than university courses. My wife has been doing COBOL for one of them since 2012, and the demand has never diminished. If anything, it's increased because experienced developers are retiring. They even pull some of these retired developers back for particularly challenging projects.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#212

Post by nromiun »

iainmerrick wrote: post #202
nromiun wrote: post #102

Anything short of a big AI winter is not going to move Python from its top spot. As Python has become the first choice of output code for LLMs its dominance is only going to grow.

Is Python really the first choice of output code? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't know the answer and I don't know where to look to find out. I would have assumed it might be JS and more specifically React -- isn't that what you often get if you ask an LLM to "make an app that does such-and-such"? (Experimental anecdata: I just asked Gemini to write an app and it gave me a single HTML file with embedded JS,…

Maybe it was because LLMs were trained most on Python code, but yes they seem to prefer it.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#213

Post by tasuki »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #28

Given how mediocre LLMs are, I don't see this happening anytime soon... but I think a "better" LLM (that puts the "language" into large language model) can seamlessly translate between programming languages. Right now, it's apparent to me that LLMs are mostly tuned in the programming space for what n-gate would call "webshit", but I think it is a clear (to me) evolutionary step towards getting much better "porting" a…

> Given how mediocre LLMs are

That's not a given... I think LLMs are amazing!

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#214

Post by iainmerrick »

nromiun wrote: post #212
iainmerrick wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Python really the first choice of output code? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't know the answer and I don't know where to look to find out. I would have assumed it might be JS and more specifically React -- isn't that what you often get if you ask an LLM to "make an app that does such-and-such"? (Experimental anecdata: I just asked Gemini to write an app and it gave me a single HTML file with embedded JS,…

Maybe it was because LLMs were trained most on Python code, but yes they seem to prefer it.

Again you're making unsupported assertions ("trained most on Python code") and coming to unsupported conclusions ("they seem to prefer it") -- my own very quick experiment shows that it depends on how you ask ("app" versus "code") at the very least.

The choices of JS and Python were pretty solid for the prompts I gave. Maybe the LLM is, well, making a reasonable decision in context, rather than just defaulting to Python!

"LLMs prefer Python" is an over-simplification. Python was already very popular, so I agree that LLMs are likely to entrench that popularity, but that doesn't mean Python will grow into other areas where it wasn't being used much before.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#215

Post by torben-friis »

davedx wrote: post #194
torben-friis wrote: post #22

As a backend dev (mostly working in fintech) I feel weirdly unable to find a target language to move to. After working with Node and Ruby for a while I really miss a static type system. - Typescript was limited by its option to allow non strictness. Nothing catches my eye, as it’s either Java/.Net and its enterprisey companies or Go, which might not be old but feels like it is, by design. Rust sounds fun, but its use…

> - Typescript was limited by its option to allow non strictness That's 100% a project setting you can turn on or off though, it's like -Wall in C++ projects. I'm also a back-end dev who's worked in fintech and IME, TypeScript is a great choice. From my experience with python, none of its type checking libraries are complete enough.

>That's 100% a project setting you can turn on or off though, it's like -Wall in C++ projects.

I know, it’s just not realistically up to me. I depend on the team/company culture which I’d rather not have in the picture - I’ve already gone through trying to fight the sea of unknown/any.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#216

Post by cyberpunk »

BoredPositron wrote: post #211
stevenjgarner wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes to your point, COBOL which ranks very low here is still fundamental to the infrastructure of several major industries, with some sources [1] reporting that it is used in: 43% of all banking systems. 95% of all US ATM transactions. 80% of all in-person credit card transactions. 96% of travel bookings. This may very well dramatically change in the next few years with such an emphasis on enterprise AI tools to rewri…

I can only speak to the two bigger German banks (i.e., Sparkasse and VR banks), but if you look at their outsourced development providers (Atruvia and Sparkasse Informatik), they're still offering incentives for their apprentices to learn COBOL, especially in the german dual apprenticeship programs which they can steer more easily than university courses. My wife has been doing COBOL for one of them since 2012, and t…

Sparkasse and VR aren't the two largest German banks. DB is at least double the size of Commerzbank which is again 100mn in assets ahead of DZ. I don't find it all that surprising that these small banks are still trying to keep their legacy systems alive, but it's not the case for the bigger boys. (Source: work for several of them)

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#217

Post by [deleted] »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #164
bberrry wrote: post #146

Those of you surprised to see Java so prominent, where have you been all your careers? 10 people startups with nodejs backends? You must have been entirely shielded from enterprise software companies.

Java is the new COBOL. The financial sector, insurance sector, healthcare sector all jumped on Java a couple of decades ago, and they have massive repositories of Java code, and are actively migrating their COBOL code to Java.

[deleted]

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#218

Post by cyberpunk »

zabzonk wrote: post #152
stevenjgarner wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes to your point, COBOL which ranks very low here is still fundamental to the infrastructure of several major industries, with some sources [1] reporting that it is used in: 43% of all banking systems. 95% of all US ATM transactions. 80% of all in-person credit card transactions. 96% of travel bookings. This may very well dramatically change in the next few years with such an emphasis on enterprise AI tools to rewri…

In retail banking I'm sure that this could be true. Working in investment banking, I never saw a single COBOL application, or had to have my C++/Java/$MODERNLANGUAGE code interact with one.

Corp bank here, everyone has rumours about COBOL systems but no one I've ever spoke to has seen, interacted or has any other evidence these really exist anymore either.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#219

Post by gf000 »

IshKebab wrote: post #190
PaulRobinson wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By far the most useful and helpful is job ads: it literally defines the demand side of the programming language market. Yes, that does not show us how much code is running out there, and some companies might have huge armies with very low churn and so the COBOL stacks in banks don’t show up, but I can’t think of a more useful and directly measurable way of understanding a languages real utility.

Yeah except job adverts have enormous lag behind what's actually popular. For example we used Rust quite a lot at my previous company but we didn't advertise for Rust developers at all. Also then you're looking at which languages were popular in the past whereas the interesting stat is which languages are being used to start new projects.

Well, we have to define what a language's popularity mean. Because Rust is surely more 'hyped', than Java, but Java has at least an order of more developers/software written, etc.

So in which meaning do you use 'popular'?

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#220

Post by nromiun »

iainmerrick wrote: post #214
nromiun wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it was because LLMs were trained most on Python code, but yes they seem to prefer it.

Again you're making unsupported assertions ("trained most on Python code") and coming to unsupported conclusions ("they seem to prefer it") -- my own very quick experiment shows that it depends on how you ask ("app" versus "code") at the very least. The choices of JS and Python were pretty solid for the prompts I gave. Maybe the LLM is, well, making a reasonable decision in context, rather than just defaulting to Pyt…

Why are you verbosely repeating my own replies? You asked why, I told you a theory that MAYBE because they were trained on Python code. You do know that's how a LLM or even a simple neural network works right?

Of course it is an over-simplification. Should I do an empirical scientific study before I can reply that MAYBE LLMs seem to prefer Python? I was talking from my own personal experience.

Are you using a LLM to write your replies? Because they seem very odd to me.

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