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Top Programming Languages 2025

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461–467 of 467 posts

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#461
post #446
post #391

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.

Libraries. RoR did swing some attention to Ruby, but it's not the first thing that comes up in almost any context. It almost comes up in no context at all except if people are asked what scripting language they like in general. Python comes up all the time and you probably have it installed already as it comes with the OS.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#462
post #25

Earlier 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.

As others have said, python has been popular for about 20 years and niche for another decade before. It's the default non-C of a ton of libraries and frameworks.

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

#463

Earlier 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.

This does make me very curious about who on earth uses Prolog professionally. And happy to think that someone might :)

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#464
post #338

I'm just happy that both VHDL and ADA are in the list.

VHDL (or Verilog) seems like another weird entry. It's one of those description languages that feels a lot like programming, but doesn't actually produce programs.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#465

Earlier 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”.

I'm guessing Swiss Bank/UBS as a mate used to trade there and had a NeXT workstation and loved Wingz. Later I heard they were doing server side pricing work on Apple servers. I stand corrected; thanks!

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#466
post #440

Earlier 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…

You cannot "point" JSpecify to anything. It is a standard like PEP 484, but much smaller, because everything else is already part of the language standard.

Re: Top Programming Languages 2025

#467
post #25

Earlier 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.

Saw your comment earlier, soon after you posted it, and was not going to reply, because others had already done so, but on second thought, I decided to reply, because I realised I had something more to add, that others had not mentioned (much):

>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.

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