Programming Language Diversity On the Rise 177
jfruh writes: "As GitHub becomes an increasingly common repository of project code, the metadata for projects saved there can tell us a lot about the state of the industry. In particular, a look at the programming languages used over the past half-decade shows an increasingly fragmented landscape, in which the overall share of most major languages is on a slight decline, while less-used languages are seeing modest growth in usage."
This is great news (Score:4, Interesting)
Competition results in better organisms, and this is equally true in programming languages as it is in life...
Honestly amazing things can now be done in a variety of languages. And it's better mentally to learn a number of languages so the variety helps to create more seasoned programmers in the long run.
Point and drool over security... (Score:2, Interesting)
This is very foreboding. Instead of people using a language that supports secure, defensive programming, it shows that the "cobble something that builds and ship it... we will fix things later" mentality has all but won in the computer industry.
Even perl, laughable as it is, is a language good enough to be relied by banks for real security. Use of languages where Bog knows what sits in memory until the garbage collector comes around to clean it up is easy on the programmer, but is fertile ground for insecure programming. Those variables that fell out of scope... does the GC bother overwriting them, or can some other process grabbing memory sift through and see what is inside?
I'm not saying we go back to Ada (although Ada 2012 is pretty good), but we don't play fast and loose with programming languages that encourage the "it builds, ship it" mentality.
Re:A good sign (Score:5, Interesting)
not when you start to have too many tools.
part of your value is being experienced in a language. you can't do that if you are spread thin amongst too many.
yeah, we can all -learn- new languages. sometimes its fun, but it stopped being fun for me decades ago (I'm a greyhair). at this point, its more of a headache to have to support this or that fad language if someone decides to write some key bit of code in his favorite. I was just thru this a few months ago, having to support a guy's code in a fad language and no one else in the company had any time spent on this language; yet this fix needed to be done yesterday.
I'd error on having 3 languages in the shop and that's about all that you'd need for most things. beyond that, you really fragment people, support and everything suffers.