Survey: JavaScript is the Most-Used Language, But Java is the Most Popular (sdtimes.com) 136
An anonymous reader quotes SD Times
Java remains the most popular primary programming language, but JavaScript is the most used programming language overall. That is according to a recently released report from JetBrains on the State of the Developer Ecosystem in 2018. The report surveyed more than 6,000 developers from 17 countries to reveal the trends driving the world of coding this year... According to the report, Java, JavaScript and Python are the top three programming languages this year, and Go is the most promising language. Twenty percent of developers use multiple versions of Go at the same time, and 26 percent set up their GOPATH per project. The top Go frameworks include Gin, Beego, Echo and Buffalo.
While 38 percent of developers have no plans to adopt any new languages this year, the top languages respondents have started to learn in the last year include Python, JavaScript, Java, Go, TypeScript and Kotlin... Eighty-two percent of respondents use IDEs while 69 percent use editors. Of those using IDEs and editors, only 12 percent cited that they don't customize their IDE/editors. In addition, 77 percent use the dark theme for their editor or IDE... Some fun facts about developers include 77 percent listen to music while they are coding; the top music to listen to includes electronic, pop and rock; 53 percent sleep seven to eight hours a night; 85 percent code on the weekends; and 57 percent prefer coffee over tea.
While 38 percent of developers have no plans to adopt any new languages this year, the top languages respondents have started to learn in the last year include Python, JavaScript, Java, Go, TypeScript and Kotlin... Eighty-two percent of respondents use IDEs while 69 percent use editors. Of those using IDEs and editors, only 12 percent cited that they don't customize their IDE/editors. In addition, 77 percent use the dark theme for their editor or IDE... Some fun facts about developers include 77 percent listen to music while they are coding; the top music to listen to includes electronic, pop and rock; 53 percent sleep seven to eight hours a night; 85 percent code on the weekends; and 57 percent prefer coffee over tea.
Wrong (Score:1, Interesting)
Most used is probably cobal, fortran, c, c++ or maybe ada. Javascript hasnt been around that long, and im sure perl is still way ahead of it. Maybe most popular in the last year, most used is a bad headline
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Most used is probably cobal,
There are still shops that use cobol, but no one starts new projects in that language, and people have been migrating away from it for a while. The pay for that skill is low, and you'd do better learning APL.
Fortran used to get a lot of use in the math areas, but they've all switched to python (numpy), R, or matlab. Combined, these do everything fortran did but better.
It's important to remember that there are an order of magnitude more programmers now than there were in the days cobol was popular, and they write a lot of code. Java is the new COBOL, and has been for 15 years.
Re: (Score:3)
The cost of the psychotherapy to go with APL would be prohibitive.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
APL sorts out Left-Brain programmers. As a result, COBOL ASCII char set derivative languages prevailed with a vastly larger pool of coders available ti industry at vastly smaller sums.
An APL Right-Brain programmer thinks abstractly along with other things:
Right brain controls left side of body
Prefer visual instructions with examples
Good at sports
Good at art
Follow Eastern thought*
Cat lovers
Enjoy clowning around
Can be hypnotized
Like to read fantasy and mystery stories
Can listen to music or TV while studying
Li
A certain mindset for APL (and CDC assembler) (Score:1)
Well, it does require a certain mindset.
I was already partway there, as a CDC 6000 assembly language programmer.
Because the words were wide and jumps were expensive and the instruction set included many boolean and integer arithmetic instructions, things that seemed to call for a loop could often be done faster without one. Deleting trailing blanks from a string (provided it fit into a word) could be done by masking selected bits, shifting temporary results, masking temporary results, adding/subtracting,
Re: (Score:2)
You wouldn't happen to be familiar with the Von Neuman S machine ?
A Turing complete machine with only one instruction.
Re: (Score:3)
A lot of scientific programming has migrated to Python (etc.), but not the software that requires speed. Python is an interpreted language while Fortran is compiled, so Python simply is not fast enough for some projects. Climate modeling, weather forecasts, most fluid dynamics code, and so on, need to be compiled to get enough speed. Usually this mean Fortran of C++. Python (etc.) is great for some forms of data analysis and smaller projects, but it has not replaced the heavy-lifting languages in the sc
Re: (Score:2)
Since we're talking Fortran and only Mechanical Engineers still used Fortran when I was in school 20+ years ago, I'd say Python or LabView are most important to learn these days for Mechanical Engineers. My understanding is Fortran is dying quickly in that industry. Personally I hate Python with a passion and am not too keen on LabView, but I didn't have to do much with either and now pretty much program straight java or C# (got laid off, now doing automation/programming/management consulting).
Re: (Score:2)
The population of people that were using Fortran after the year 2000 that are doing Java development to solve their problems rounds to 0%.
Fortran's popularity in brand new codebases for technical computing persisted as it was particularly well suited for scientific computing, a little less able to do fancy programming tricks, but also less intimidating.
A significant portion of that user base has moved to Python, with the heavy lifting done in C libraries that have been written, and the rather less 'scary' l
Re: (Score:2)
Strange,
Climate modeling, weather forecasts, most fluid dynamics code, and so on, need to be compiled to get enough speed.
The meteorologic institutes on the world disagree. Most of their software is Python.
Re: (Score:2)
It's important to remember that there are an order of magnitude more programmers now than there were in the days cobol was popular, and they write a lot of code. Java is the new COBOL, and has been for 15 years.
Java is about 27 years old. By 2003 (15 years ago) Java had been the dominate language for almost a decade.
Re: (Score:2)
There are still shops that use cobol, but no one starts new projects in that language
Of course they start new projects in COBOL.
It's important to remember that there are an order of magnitude more programmers now than there were in the days cobol was popular
Yeah, most people don't think about that.
According to this: https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
The Android app store has about 4 million apps, the Apple one about 2 million. Obviously many apps are super simple. But assuming you do something decent an App
Re: (Score:1)
I doubt it. I'm guessing more code has been written in the last ten years than the preceding hundred. Much of it may be utter cock, but there's a fucktonne of it, and almost none of it is in cobol, fortran or ada.
Re: (Score:2)
The thing is, you have years of accumulated business logic in C**** (I will not utter its name here). Do you reverse engineer and rewrite all that stuff in whatever language is bending on twatface and cackexchange?
No. Because you daren't. You have no idea what the holy fucking Mary it does, but you know that if it suddenly stops doing it you're in big shit[1]. There's magic 12s and 20s and 240s scattered about like underwear in Ibiza that are probably something to do with converting old money into metric
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Most used is probably cobal
I have met hundreds of developers. Many of them work in finance, payroll, and business process programming. None of them have used Cobol in more than 20 years. I am sure there are a few legacy Cobol programs still out there, but it is not common at all, and it is a myth that there is a vast secret parallel world of Cobol programmers slaving away in gigantic cubicle farms.
fortran, c, c++ or maybe ada
Fortran is used for HPC, but even there C++ is displacing it.
Ada is not even used by the military anymore for new projects. Airbus us
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Funny)
This 'story' needs the GIF of Captain Picard going, "Oh, no, not this crap AGAIN".
https://memegenerator.net/img/... [memegenerator.net]
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. Once again, and equally pointless as every other time it's been done, these articles talk about "most used / most popular programming languages" as though you could talk about "most used / most popular vehicular-based transportation" and have it mean anything at all except for statistics or bragging rights.
Since this is slashdot - a car analogy: Just like the fact that a basic car is probably the "most popular" vehicular transportation doesn't mean it's the best at all jobs. Like crossing an ocea
Re: (Score:2)
Most used is the language with all the four-letter command names.
Re: (Score:3)
Fortran isn't used to generate garbage mini-programs for advertisements. It's clear how JavaScript is used more than anything else despite its very short life.
I wouldn't be surprised if more JavaScript is written in a year than in all of COBOL's lifetime. I don't have the numbers, so I don't know. but something to think about.
That said being the most used or the most popular doesn't really mean these languages are the best. (depends on what you measure the language by)
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole article is cheerleading for some of the worst technologies ever to get mainstream attention, so forget about factual accuracy.
Re: (Score:1)
If by "most used" you mean number of human beings developing with those frameworks
The 2nd one is the most natural way of reading that phrase IMHO.
I'm strange (Score:1)
I like C++ and C#, drink coffee and tea, use an IDE (Visual Studio) with the light theme, and would be delighted to try Go for $200. My favorite music is by Taylor Swift, and I love to code on the weekends listening to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCXGJQYZ9JA
Re: (Score:2)
Popularity contest say very little (Score:3)
Javascript is used for many Terabytes of completely needless code for Websites.
Java is in large part popular because many universities teach it to their students. Essentially it's similar to the question what language you know.
What would be more interesting would be to ask the same question for different uses.
Popularity contests actually say a lot (Score:2)
I would argue that they don't provide any meaningful, actionable data.
There are implications about what developers should look at to prepare for the future, but I don't think anybody will tell you that basing your education/training on what's popular now is of any long term value (although you could argue that learning Cobol and MVS/JCL in the 1970s/1980s would provide you with a nice living now).
I honestly don't care what IDEs, drinks or music other developers use while working: unless they result in flash
Re: (Score:2)
Java is popular because it is highly entrenched in the enterprise. In the financial world it has been steadily eclipsing COBOL for two decades. It is taught in universities because whether all the Python and C## fans like it or not, it is a highly successful language and platform. It is by no means perfect, but perfection is the enemy of the good.
Re: (Score:2)
COBOL needed to die decades ago. It was kept on life support by bankers (some of the financial world like the stock market let it go years ago) and the bank mainframes they didn't want to upgrade, mainly. Python is a popular language for mostly non-programmers and nearly everything I've seen written with it is classic functional programming.
The biggest problem at least for enterprise is it often Python code has a complete lack of reusability. When I write java classes I follow the strict OOP paradig
The Problem with Java in the Enterprise is... (Score:2)
that it's a single vendor standard. Should Oracle get bust or loose interest, you have a problem. Even if Oracle doesn't loose interest there are already widely diverging versions of Java. For example a Java 8 compiler won't even compile Java 2k code.
Re: (Score:2)
For example a Java 8 compiler won't even compile Java 2k code.
And why would it? Java2k is a language like brainfuck, just made for fun and nerdyness.
Re: (Score:2)
Well I'd put all the many Java dialects into that category.
Re: (Score:2)
You could also say:
One wonders how much power at Amazon would be saved if they didn't have to accommodate all the Java traceback dumps flying around their infrastructure.
Re: (Score:1)
Java is the COBOL of our era.
Re:Popularity contest say very little (Score:5, Insightful)
While this undoubtedly happens, it isn't why Java is popular.
Java is popular because it has a very large ecosystem. In its early days, Sun and especially IBM threw a lot of weight behind it. This meant it had a good IDE early on, and key libraries became available quickly (e.g. the JDBC API standardized SQL database support, and all the database companies quickly supported it).
Also "write once, run everywhere" wasn't perfect, but it was a hell of lot better than the contemporary alternatives.
This got the snowball rolling, and it has built up momentum ever since. Today, the Java ecosystem is simply much bigger than everyone else. More libraries, more and better tools, more installed base, more questions answered on StackOverflow, and more programmers (admittedly of varying skill levels). It is essentially the standard in corporate IT.
Re: (Score:2)
In COBOL and FORTRAN you can indeed "write once and compile/run anywhere" and have been able to do so for decades
True if you never used any vendor extensions, which on some machines were almost impossible to do.
'Modern' languages are not any better, different issue but same end result.
For example, Java "run anywhere" means you need 2 maybe 3 different interpreter versions, depending upon the application. One person has 3 different interpreters on their Windows PC.
Re: (Score:2)
And that, unfortunately, is pretty much the situation. Java and JavaScript are the tool of choice for today's moron coders that understand absolutely nothing and that need to be protected from anything even a little complicated.
Re: (Score:2)
That is a generalization that offers little insight. They can tend to be that way, and certainly can appear that way, because they are so widely used and thus have evolved libraries and tooling that grunt coders can work with and understand.
But Java can also solve quite sophisticated problems, in quite sophisticated ways, in the hands of a highly skilled team. It has some pretty nice features; as an example, parallel streams are very convenient and have a lot of expressive power, provided you understand par
Re: Popularity contest say very little (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No, that's not what I meant. "Stringly typed" is a pun that programming language theorists use to derisively describe JavaScript's typing system. Note my later sentence about TypeScript, which I always prefer for any significant browser-based application subsytem, like a SPA, or for something non-trivial in node.js
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And nevertheless most people don't can distinguish Java from C/C++ or JavaScript code ...
No idea why you hate people who prefer to write in Java.
Code is code, get over it.
Hardware is irrelevant in > 90% of all cases of software development.
Here some C code to bloat about:
int* ptr = 0x3FAD;
*ptr = 1;
What dos it do? Spare me the answer: you don't know. But it is perfect C, isn't it?
Re: (Score:2)
JavaScript is a ridiculously bloated language. Look at the size of most of the libraries.
Re: (Score:2)
OK - I've looked, and they seem fine to me. Want to try making a more substantive argument? Maybe with examples and evidence your examples are not outliers?
Re: (Score:2)
In terms of web development: Are you talking about native Javascript (size of library: 0K), or web applications that load jQuery and other large libraries just to move a
tag around in a webpage a little more easily (in their opinion)?
I have an application stack that I've been messing around with that loads tons of libraries including React and Material UI and after running uglify js, the whole shebang is about 290k, VERY SMALL.
What was the *actual* polling methodology? (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA: "More than 15K people participated in the Developer Ecosystem Survey 2018, but only the responses of 6K respondents were included in this report." They go on to say that they used social media to find their population and weighted the results according to countries and whether or not the respondent was a student.
So why should I consider these results as representative of anything? First, almost 2/3rds of the responses weren't used and then, on the responses they deemed acceptable, they were weighted in some way which they don't explain.
I bet that if I took the same data, applied my own response filter and weighting system, I could show that:
- Pascal is the number one programming language
- Arduino IDE is the most popular development environment
- 42% listen to old Jack Benny radio shows while coding
and so on...
Re: (Score:2)
To me, it seemed like they used ALL the responses from ad networks (realizing the ones they got via their IDE would be way too biased), but they didn't actually say that outright.
85 percent code on the weekends (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Then you don't get out much.
Re: (Score:2)
Protip: It is not a good idea to replace something bad with something worse...
Kotlin? What a joke. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
You need to get out of your cave. Kotlin is now the primary language that Google advises to use to develop Android apps (you've heard of Android, right?), and it's becoming strong on the server-side as well, where Spring (the most used server-side framework on the JVM, which is itself the most used programming platform), among others pushes its use too.
Re: (Score:3)
Fun fact: "Kot" literally means "shit" in German....
Re: (Score:2)
Fun fact: Kotlin is named after an island near St. Petersburg, Russia, where the language was developed.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder how that island got its name...
Re: (Score:2)
"Shit Island"? That might fit with the stereotypical Russian worldview.
Re: (Score:2)
It's more "dung" or "faeces" than "shit".
Re: (Score:2)
It is an overly formal term (as for example an MD would use) for "shit". It means exactly the same substance though.
Re: (Score:2)
You need to get out of your cave. Kotlin is now the primary language that Google advises to use to develop Android apps
Yea, they also advised we drop Facebook and only use our Google+ accounts. That's why you should never take advice solely from the creator of a product.
Re: (Score:2)
Lately, I wish I *had* dropped Facebook and only used my Google+ account.
Re: (Score:2)
Lately I've been using Kotlin for Android development. It's nice (way better than using Java).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't take JS seriously until after I read Crockford's book. That was illuminating. Even older versions of JS can be okay if you understand the nature of the language and what you should avoid. And I agree it's (mostly) gotten better. Using modern ECMAScript is actually pretty nice.
Re: (Score:1)
When I first counted on indeed.com a few months ago, I didn't see any listings.
Then a month ago I saw 5.
This is in the Raleigh area.
By comparison there are usually 200 or so C# and thousands of HTMLs.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Spring Boot and Grails are definitive proof that 90% of the complaints about learning curve were always a problem of developer culture and not the platform. It is probably easier to do a Spring Boot quickstart now than a Rails or Django one because the basic setup that just works is two files (pom.xml and a Java or Groovy source file).
But to do anything meaningful or moderately complex requires underlying knowledge of how Spring Boot works. While there is a lot of documentation on Spring Boot, I find it's exceedingly difficult to find a straight answer on "How do I do X". Usually there are at least 3 to 9 different answers with many (most?) outdated answers floating around.
I generally consider myself to be a competent programmer in many languages, but when it comes to Spring Boot I feel like I've been dropped in the ocean without a life
Re: (Score:2)
Like banging my head against the wall, I do it because it feels so good when I stop.
My Results (because you know you're interested) (Score:2)
Most used languages:
Swift (for iOS)
Kotlin (for Android)
C# or VB.NET (for server-side - the company I work for has a MS server stack)
JavaScript (for web)
Over the history of my career, the most used language is probably Java (for server-side, for Android, and even for some client applications), followed by C++ and C (for desktop applications and embedded systems). For iOS, I used Objective C until Swift came out.
As far as preferences, I like both Swift and Kotlin (and prefer them over Objective C and Java). J
The author is confused (Score:2)
Java is a programming language. Javascript and Python are scripting languages.
Re: (Score:2)
What, in reality, is the difference?
Does "programming language" mean a "compiled" language? If so, Java doesn't fit this description, unless you count byte-code, which is not native to the processor. The only modern compiled languages these days are C and C++.
Does "scripting language" mean one that is interpreted as it is executed? If so, Javascript isn't always interpreted at runtime. This depends on the environment. Web browsers these days are compiling Javascript to WebAssembly, which is as close to "com
Re: (Score:2)
Programming languages' primary feature is creating independent programs and APIs.
Scripting languages' primary feature is using APIs to move data between independent programs. Some scrpting languages can be (mis)used as programming languages, but this comes with horrible performance penalties.
Re: (Score:2)
What is an "independent program"? A command line executable? Maybe that's how Linux developers think. But in the real world, "programs" are never independent. Can Javascript be used to create a command line program? Yes. Is that a misuse of the language? On what basis?
Javascript is, by far, the most popular language for building APIs. These are more commonly known as REST APIs. Is this a misuse of the language? Again, on what basis?
Performance used to be an issue for Javascript, until Google came along and
Re: (Score:2)
Are you aware that the Linux operating system has been implemented in Javscript, and will run in your browser?
https://bellard.org/jslinux/ [bellard.org]
How can one NOT recognize this as real programming! Performance, as you can see, is not bad.