SD Times takes another look at the uptake of Java 11 Previous reports of the Java community found that developers were still mainly using Java 8 and didn't adopt newer versions, but according to Snyk's JVM Ecosystem Report 2021, that is starting to change. This year, 61.5% of respondents are using Java 11 somewhere in production, and almost 12% are using the latest release, which was Java 15 during the survey. "This is huge, because it shows that developers do upgrade their Java version beyond Java 8 to some extent. The mantra that most Java developers are comfortable staying on Java 8 seems to be slowly breaking apart," Snyk stated in the report.

However, half of the Java 11 users — which is currently the most used version — still use Java 8 in their production stack...

In addition, almost half of developers (44%) use the free AdoptOpenJDK distribution in production as one of their JDKs and 48% use it in development.
"Other findings are that Java is still by far the most popular language by a long shot and Snyk stated it will probably remain that way in the foreseeable future and that JetBrains IntellIJ IDEA still remains dominant as an IDE in the Java ecosystem."

The TIOBE index of programming language popularity celebrates 20 years of continuous publishing this month. Started as a hobbyist project back in 2001, the site estimates each programming language's popularity by counting search engine results for the phrase <language> programming (indirectly counting each listing for developers, courses, and third-party vendors).

When it was started 20 years ago, the top languages were Java, C, and C++.

20 years later, the top languages are now C, Java, Python, and C++

And "The difference between position 1 and position 3 is only 0.67%." This means that the next few months will be exciting. What language is going to win this battle? Python seems to have the best chances to become number 1, thanks to its market leadership in the booming field of data mining and artificial intelligence.
ZDNet also noted the trends: Searches for C were down 4.83 percentage points compared to last July. Java searches were down 3.93% over the period, while Python gained 1.86%.

The top 10 languages behind C, Java and Python are C++, C#, Visual Basic, Javascript, PHP, Assembly Language, and SQL.
But they also have this to say about TIOBE's calculations: It's a different methodology to developer analyst RedMonk, which looks at language usage on software projects hosted on GitHub and discussions on the developer Q&A site, Stack Overflow.

RedMonk's Q1 2021 rankings place JavaScript in top place, followed by Python and Java.

Other interesting moves this month:

• C++ gained more than 0.5% getting closer to the top 3
• Rust rose from #30 to #27
• Go rose from #20 to #13
• TypeScript rose from #45 to #37
• Haskellrose rose from #49 to #39