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Top Programming Languages 2025

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Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#191

Post by davedx »

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.

Yeah when I worked in investment banking it was VBA and Java everywhere, never saw or heard of COBOL.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#192

Post by ffsm8 »

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…

Cobol is used in pretty much all enterprise legacy systems.

But "used in" doesn't mean that it's actively being developed by more then a tiny team for maintaining it.

As this graph we're commenting on is mostly talking about popularity/most used it's never going to rate higher, because for every one Cobol dev there are more then 100 Java devs employed by the same company

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#193

Post by anon1395 »

BuildItBusk wrote: post #76
kstrauser wrote: post #59

I’m skeptical. There are more people writing PHP and Ruby than HTML? And HTML is a programming language? Those two very surprising results make me doubt the others. Elixir behind OCaml? Possible, I guess, but I know of several large Elixir shops and I haven’t heard much of OCaml in a while.

As mentioned, HTML is indeed a programming language. But it’s one that is rarely used on its own. So you could argue that having it as a thing of itself in these lists, makes little sense.

HTML isn't turing complete

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#194

Post by davedx »

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.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#195

Post by jibal »

jaxelr wrote: post #51

Kinda surprising that I see nothing from Zig on all these lists.

You shouldn't expect to see any pre-1.0 language in this list, especially Zig which not only makes no stability guarantees but actively discourages expecting any stability. Heck, Zig 0.15 just came out that completely overhauled the IO framework from top to bottom. Once Zig reaches 1.0, expect them to make some effort to gain adherents, which currently is a complete non-goal.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#196

Post by asplake »

osullivj wrote: post #173
8fingerlouie wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've said this myself as Java's reification of mid 90s OO and poor interop via JNI are not to my taste. But I've spent 25yrs in banking with JPMC, BoA, Barclays et al. Done lots of interop with Cobol on S/390, AS/400 and VME. Never heard of any of those systems being rewritten in Java. Have encountered key mainframe prod systems for which source is lost.

I know of one investment bank (a former employer) that rewrote its mainframe-based settlement system in Java (on Linux). Front office systems were often Java (replacing Obj-C in some cases).

That was two decades ago – almost a generation! Interesting to think that some of those systems would now be considered “legacy”.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#197

Post by psychoslave »

> AI assistance means that programmers can concern themselves less and less with the particulars of any language.

Sure. Until we need to. Then we face some apparently tiny concern, which is actually deeply intricated with the rest of this whole mess, and we are ready for a ride in the rabbit hole.

> most developers today don’t pay much attention to the instruction sets and other hardware idiosyncrasies of the CPUs that their code runs on, which language a program is vibe coded in ultimately becomes a minor detail.

This can be very misguided from my part but I have the feeling they are two very different cases here. Ok, not everyone is a ffmpeg level champion who will thrive in code-golfing ASM til the last drop of cycle gain.

But there are also probably reasons why third-generation programming language lasted without any other subsequent proposal completely displacing them. It’s all about a tradeoff of expressiveness and precision. What we want to keep in the focus zone, and what we want to delegate to mostly uncontrolled details.

If to go faster we need to get rid of a transparent glasses, we will need very sound and solid alternative probes to report what’s going on ahead.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#198

Post by hk__2 »

superlopuh wrote: post #137
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…

Python with Pyright in strict mode. I work on a ~200kLOC fully typed Python project [0] and am having fun. [0]: https://github.com/xdslproject/xdsl

Have you worked with TypeScript? I’m working with both every day and I’m always frustrated by the limits of the 'type' system in Python- sure it’s better than nothing but it’s so basic compared to what you can do in TypeScript. It’s very easy to use advanced generics in TypeScript but a hell to do (sometimes outright impossible) in Python.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#199

Post by noisy_boy »

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.

Anyone who is surprised is not from Finance sector. I wouldn't just say enterprise though because there could be non-finance enterprises where Microsoft and .NET/C# rule.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#200

Post by yolo3000 »

bjackman wrote: post #185
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.

It's a weird one - I've been at Google for more than 5 years. I know from the stats that we have a zillion lines of actively developed Java, there must be huge swathes of the company that you could even call a "Java shop". I dig into random bits of code all the time. And yet I've looked at Java maybe three times in my tenure. And if I needed to submit Java code, I would not have a single contact to ping for readabili…

So what are the main languages there? Go? Python?
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