Python at number 1 makes me cringe... In my experience, Python is not a language that I would use for anything other than a script or some solo PoC. I would absolutely never use it on code expected to exceed 1000 lines, code that's maintained by more than one person, or code that takes more than a few seconds to run. Python has a lot of great libraries as a result of it being the language of choice to teach non softw…
Same. I strictly use it for scripting. Was messing around with ML stuff last year and hated it so much I gave up after a month. Don't understand why Ruby is so much less popular. Seems like Python is de facto "first language" (it was for me), but I would advocate for Ruby.
Top Programming Languages 2025
461–467 of 467 posts
Re: Top Programming Languages 2025
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ruby became popular mainly because of Rails, which has gone down somewhat in popularity in recent years. That may be why Ruby is less popular now than it was 10 years ago. Also, they (Ruby and Rails) got popular much before 10 years ago, like around 2006 / 2007, when the Web 2.0 wave was starting. I had worked on a couple of dot-com projects in Ruby on Rails at that time, that is how I know.
And Python got popular cause of LLM AI thing. It is a shame, cause it is quite slow. I had some good time with jython back in the 2 days, but really wished something more elegant (nim/rust/ocaml) has taken over this AI thing instead of python. One thing is for sure, don't get tight down to one language cause it is popular today. Go with whatever make sense for you and your project.
Python isn't popular because of LLM's. Python is used for LLM's because it's popular. You can replace LLM in that with dozens of other labels and it's still true.
Re: Top Programming Languages 2025
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clojure being so low, including below Prolog of all things, is so obviously wrong.
As a professional user of Prolog I'm feeling pretty smug over this morning's coffee.
Re: Top Programming Languages 2025
#464I'm just happy that both VHDL and ADA are in the list.
Re: Top Programming Languages 2025
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
JSpecify does. And the work for adding null restricted types to Java has already started: https://openjdk.org/jeps/8303099
Thank you for sharing this, I was unaware of this and it does seem very promising. I hope that the JEP gets done soon. As this is, in fact, tacked on, I guess you don't really get much benefit unless you rewrite all your code with these still non-standard annotations. It does not seem like pointing JSpecify at a standard spring boot codebase will do anything for you. Whereas pointing Mypy to a standard Python codebas…
Re: Top Programming Languages 2025
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ruby became popular mainly because of Rails, which has gone down somewhat in popularity in recent years. That may be why Ruby is less popular now than it was 10 years ago. Also, they (Ruby and Rails) got popular much before 10 years ago, like around 2006 / 2007, when the Web 2.0 wave was starting. I had worked on a couple of dot-com projects in Ruby on Rails at that time, that is how I know.
And Python got popular cause of LLM AI thing. It is a shame, cause it is quite slow. I had some good time with jython back in the 2 days, but really wished something more elegant (nim/rust/ocaml) has taken over this AI thing instead of python. One thing is for sure, don't get tight down to one language cause it is popular today. Go with whatever make sense for you and your project.
>And Python got popular cause of LLM AI thing.
Python got wildly, maybe exponentially more popular because of LLM AI thing (sic), but only in the last few years.
There, fixed that for you.
Much before that, Python was already quite popular for a long time (although it was slow to take off initially), and was used in a lot of areas, including web dev - Django (Disqus, Instagram?), Flask, TurboGears, Pyramid, Tornado (FriendFeed), Zope, Plone, and many more web frameworks, and apps built on them, PDF generation (ReportLab, more), scientific programming (Numeric, NumPy, SciPy, more), data science, ActiveState, system administration (e.g. on some Linuxes, at least Ubuntu, IIRC), and even GUI app development (PyQt, Tkinter, wxPython). I read somewhere, quite a while back, that the Dropbox GUI clients on both windows and Linux, maybe on Mac OS too, were written using Python and wxPython.
Google some of those project names, and see the start dates of those projects. That will give you a clue about how long it has been in use.
Google was using Python a lot from many years back, on the front end of its web properties, apart from other uses that I would not know about.
And tons of startups and corporates used Python from long back, and still do.
I know some of these things, because I have worked with Python from a long time, starting with v1.5, with light use, and with heavier use from v2.0 or so.