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Top Programming Languages 2025

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Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#401

Post by lunias »

mimir wrote: post #351
torben-friis wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

My startup switched from python to Java and saw our productivity explode. Using modern Java versions in a non enterprise way (no frameworks, minimal oop, minimal DI, functional features like immutable objects, optional, etc) is quite nice. Our ability to deliver performant and working features was orders of magnitude faster than python. The ecosystem of libraries is crazy deep which also helps build quickly. I won’t…

100%. Java has an amazing standard library, amazing IDE support, AOT compilation, JIT optimizations, static typing, runs much faster generally, and supports multi-threading... seems like a no-brainer to me.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#402

Post by somethingsome »

bitwize wrote: post #399
somethingsome wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take into account that this is posted on IEEE. In my opinion, their target audience are scientists rather than programmers, and a scientist most often think of code as a tool to express his ideas (hence, perfect AI generated code is kind of a graal). The faster he can express them, even if the code is ugly, the better. He does not care to reuse the code later most of the time. I have the hint that scientists and not…

If code is actually viewed as a tool to express ideas, making it easy to read and figure out should be a goal.

I like programming, I like clean code, so it's something I struggled with when I began research.

But actually, producing easy to read code when you don't have specifications, because you don't know yet if the idea will work, and you are discovering problems on that idea as you go doesn't lead to readable code naturally.

You refactor all the time, but then something that you misunderstood becomes a concern, and you need to refactorer again everything, and again and again.. You loose much time, and research is fast paced.

Scientists that spend too much time cleaning code often miss deadlines and deliverables that are actually what they need to produce. Nobody cares about their code, as when the idea is fully developed, other scientist will just rewrite a better software with full view of the problem. (some scientists rewrite their full software when everything is discovered)

I think a sensible goal would be easy to write code instead of easy to read for scientists.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#403

Post by lunias »

OutOfHere wrote: post #64
bgwalter wrote: post #44

The methodology involves search hits, Stackoverflow, conference and journal articles. In all of these Python is artificially over-represented. Search hits and Stackoverflow questions represent beginners who are force fed Python in university or in expensive Python consultancy sessions. Journal articles are full of "AI" topics, which use Python. Python is not used in any application on my machine apart from OS package…

Huh. If you hate AI as you sorely do, you will find any excuse to be dismissive. Besides AI development, Python is used heavily in data processing and data science, also in writing bots of any kind, and as a glue language to do numerous tasks. It is true that it is being replaced by Go in web backends, but it still sees heavy use in that too. Moreover, Python is the only language that many AIs can interactively use i…

Python is used heavily in data science (and a lot of other places) because people who go to university for non software engineering disciplines get taught Python because it's "the easy language that already has libraries for this research we're doing." Those people then go on to write more of these libraries. Their code does amazing things, but very slowly.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#404

Post by HankStallone »

lunias wrote: post #403
OutOfHere wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. If you hate AI as you sorely do, you will find any excuse to be dismissive. Besides AI development, Python is used heavily in data processing and data science, also in writing bots of any kind, and as a glue language to do numerous tasks. It is true that it is being replaced by Go in web backends, but it still sees heavy use in that too. Moreover, Python is the only language that many AIs can interactively use i…

Python is used heavily in data science (and a lot of other places) because people who go to university for non software engineering disciplines get taught Python because it's "the easy language that already has libraries for this research we're doing." Those people then go on to write more of these libraries. Their code does amazing things, but very slowly.

There's a good video series called "Programming Paradigms" by Jerry Cain, taken from his class at Stanford. I'm not sure how long ago it was, but it was before whiteboards, when they were still using chalk. He just started including Python that year when it was the up-and-coming thing, as an example of a higher-level language that does a lot of stuff for you. It probably seemed like a breeze for the students after the previous weeks spent on C, assembly, and Lisp, but at least they got some of the fundamentals of how things worked first.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#405

Post by ppeetteerr »

ystvn wrote: post #88
ppeetteerr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Java is maturing into a syntactically nice language, albeit slowly, and it's the backbone of many medium and large companies. I've heard about Java initiatives to improve it, but can you point to examples of how how Java "is maturing into a syntactically nice language"? I'm tempted to learn it, but wonder whether it would really become nice enough to become a 'go-to' language (over TS in my case)

I've always felt it was verbose and the need for classes for everything was a bit of a overkill in 90% of circumstances (we're even seeing a pushback against OOP these days).

Here are some actual improvements:

- Record classes

public record Point(int x, int y) { }

- Record patterns

record Person(String name, int age) { }

if (obj instanceof Person(String name, int age)) { System.out.println(name + " is " + age); }

- No longer needing to import base Java types - Automatic casting

if (obj instanceof String s) { // use s directly }

Don't get me wrong, I still find some aspects of the language frustrating:

- all pointers are nullable with support from annotation to lessen the pain

- the use of builder class functions (instead of named parameters like in other languages)

- having to define a type for everything (probably the best part of TS is inlining type declarations!)

But these are minor gripes

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#406

Post by lunias »

HankStallone wrote: post #404
lunias wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is used heavily in data science (and a lot of other places) because people who go to university for non software engineering disciplines get taught Python because it's "the easy language that already has libraries for this research we're doing." Those people then go on to write more of these libraries. Their code does amazing things, but very slowly.

There's a good video series called "Programming Paradigms" by Jerry Cain, taken from his class at Stanford. I'm not sure how long ago it was, but it was before whiteboards, when they were still using chalk. He just started including Python that year when it was the up-and-coming thing, as an example of a higher-level language that does a lot of stuff for you. It probably seemed like a breeze for the students after th…

Totally, it's always about trade-offs. It takes a decent amount of time programming to become comfortable choosing the language based on the task rather than tailoring the task to the language.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#407

Post by agentultra »

epolanski wrote: post #350
agentultra wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you recognize a memory corruption bug when the LLM cheerfully reports that everything is perfect? Would you understand why some code is less performant than it could be if you've never written and learned any C yourself? How would you know if the LLM output is gibberish/wrong? They're not wrong ; it's just not black-and-white. LLMs happen to sometimes generate what you want. Often times, for experienced program…

Not sure how your comments relates to mine. The parent I answered said you shouldn't use LLMs for things you don't understand while I advocate you should use them to help you learn. You seem to describe very different use cases. In any case, just to answer your (unrelated to mine) comment, here[1] you can see a video of one of the most skilled C developers on the planet finding very hard to spot bugs in the Redis cod…

I was commenting on relying completely on the LLM when learning a language like C when you don’t have any prior understanding of C.

How do people using LLMs this way know that the generated code/text doesn’t contain errors or misrepresentations? How do they find out?

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#408

Post by maleldil »

FacelessJim wrote: post #390
maleldil wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been years since typing was added to Python, and many people still underestimate it. You're right; Python with strict type hints is more type-safe than Java and Go. It even has features like pattern matching and proper enums, both of which Go lacks. The only issue is that some libraries (not many!) are still untyped, so you may need to write wrappers or stubs occasionally. But that applies to a small and decreas…

You should give Julia a go, can be written completely static if desired (not as static as rust of course, but compared to python it’s miles ahead). Can be made fast, very fast. AOT compilation with trimmed executables is coming in 1.12

Doesn't Julia suffer from very long startup times? One of the things I use Python for is CLI programs. The startup time isn't great either, but Julia was even worse last I tested.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#409

Post by fhd2 »

thfuran wrote: post #378
somethingsome wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take into account that this is posted on IEEE. In my opinion, their target audience are scientists rather than programmers, and a scientist most often think of code as a tool to express his ideas (hence, perfect AI generated code is kind of a graal). The faster he can express them, even if the code is ugly, the better. He does not care to reuse the code later most of the time. I have the hint that scientists and not…

But reproducibility is famously a matter of some concern to scientists.

Sure, but their tools are complexity management tools: Hypotheses, experiments, empirical evidence, probabilities. To my knowledge, they deal far less with the determism programmers rely on. It's reproducible if you get similar results with the same probability.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#410

Post by ChrisRackauckas »

maleldil wrote: post #408
FacelessJim wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should give Julia a go, can be written completely static if desired (not as static as rust of course, but compared to python it’s miles ahead). Can be made fast, very fast. AOT compilation with trimmed executables is coming in 1.12

Doesn't Julia suffer from very long startup times? One of the things I use Python for is CLI programs. The startup time isn't great either, but Julia was even worse last I tested.

Julia v1.12, the unreleased version which is currently in release candidate stage (and has had a longer RC stage than expected but should be done at least by the end of the year) has the ability to fully ahead of time compile and generate binaries, like you would expect from a language like C. It also trims these binaries so that they are a reasonable size given the elements of the runtime that are used. Thus for good type-stable code you get callable binaries without JIT overhead, and this leads to a much better CLI experience. It will take a bit of time so that there's more package tooling and support built around this feature, but this is the path a lot of the ecosystem CLI tooling is now going and that will be a pretty dramatic shift in the usability for these kinds of use cases which Julia had traditionally ignored.
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