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…
Java is maturing into a syntactically nice language, albeit slowly, and it's the backbone of many medium and large companies. You might have trouble finding small companies using anything but JS/Ruby/Python. These companies align more with velocity and cost of engineering, and not so much with performance. That's probably why the volume of interpreted languages is greater than that of "enterprisey" or "performance" l…
Top Programming Languages 2025
271–280 of 467 posts
Re: Top Programming Languages 2025
#272Kinda surprising that I see nothing from Zig on all these lists.
Don’t think zig will ever make it into popularity tbh. It is good for low level but it isn’t like rust or go. Rust and go are really good alternatives for c++ or java code, they just work, have good tooling etc. But I would never use zig for that kind of use case instead of rust since you don’t need to go full on engineering every dot mode. I switched to zig from rust for implementing a database since 6 months and ha…
> I switched to zig from rust for implementing a database since 6 months and have no regrets but just don’t think anyone would use it for writing backend code or other similar smaller things.
I don't have a horse in this race, but have you shared more about this decision? It would make for a good blog post and an even better HN discussion.Re: Top Programming Languages 2025
#273As 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…
Scala is the best language I've ever used - all the good parts of Typescript and all the good parts of Java or Rust. And fintech is one of the few niches where you might still be able to find a job using it.
Intellij tools are great.
Re: Top Programming Languages 2025
#274> 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 th…
Re: Top Programming Languages 2025
#275It's hard to find good data sources for this, especially that StackOverflow is in decline[1]. IEEE's methodology[2] is sensible given what's possible, but the data sources are all flawed in some ways (that don't necessarily cancel each other out). The number of search results reported by Google is the most volatile indirect proxy signal. Search results include everything mentioning the query, without promising it bei…
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.
It feels like that metric misses "utility" and instead comes from a very American (or capitalistic maybe is better) mindset.
What about Max/MSP/Jitter? Huge impact in the music scene, probably has very small amount jobs available, so it'd rank fairly low while it's probably the top media/music language out there today. There are tons of languages that provide "the most utility for their domain" yet barely have any public job ads about them at all.
I think such metric would be useful to see the "employability of someone who knows that language" if anything, but probably more pain than gain to link "# of job ads" with "utility".
Re: Top Programming Languages 2025
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with Java? It's used everywhere from FinTech startups to banks/insurers, with features like decimal arithmetic introduced specially for finance a long time ago, multiple runtimes (Oracle/JVM, IBM T9, GraalVM), a very healthy ecosystem of libs/packages, etc.
>What's wrong with Java? It's used everywhere from FinTech startups to banks/insurers As the OP, it’s not even the language for me but the implications of companies that use it. It’s a non starter for startup/scaleups and strongly related with oldish companies and consulting firms, which in turn translates to far worse working conditions (not remote friendly, overtime, dress code, etc). Mind that it might just be a l…
mkay
Re: Top Programming Languages 2025
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other than comptime, it doesn't bring anything new to the 21st century. Its safety story is basically what Modula-2 (1978) and Object Pascal (1986) already had, but now it gets done with curly brackets instead of a begin/end language. UAF is an issue, and the tooling to tackle this issue is exactly the same that C and C++ have available for the last 30 years, give it or take it. It will be another language to talk ab…
Eh? As far as I can tell Zig already has more traction than e.g. D, which is listed. I don't think it's aiming for mainstream adoption anyway, it's a very specific niche.
D once upon a time was also hyped due to its Facebook usage, Remedy game engine tooling.
Also, has Zig already gone to space?
https://forum.dlang.org/thread/10614fc$273$1@digitalmars.com
Or used by car companies?
https://forum.dlang.org/thread/evridmtwtnhhwvorohyv@forum.dl...
Anyway, I don't expect any of them to grow beyond their niche userbase.
D has lost its momentum, and Zig isn't really interesting as 21st century language in the AI tooling age.
Re: Top Programming Languages 2025
#278Re: Top Programming Languages 2025
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keeping 7 Ada vendors in business, one of the few areas where developers actually pay for tooling. https://www.adacore.com/ https://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/apexada https://www.ddci.com/solutions/products/ddci-developer-suite... http://www.irvine.com/tech.html http://www.ocsystems.com/w/index.php/OCS:PowerAda http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/prod…
It's more like people in golf suits agree on corruption schemes rather than actual devs making decisions.
Re: Top Programming Languages 2025
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
In retail banking I'm sure that this could be true. Working in investment banking, I never saw a single COBOL application, or had to have my C++/Java/$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.
But I asked for a bank statement from my old savings account a few years old and it took two weeks to print out, printed in monospace dot matrix.
Or the betting company that I was a customer that suspends betting everyday 6:30am for an hour for daily maintainance. Ironically, they would accept bets for football matches played at the time, but the system was shut down.
I suspect both are run on COBOL.