Python Overtakes Java in New Language Popularity Ranking, As Rust Reaches Top 20 (zdnet.com) 91
"Programming language Python is now firmly the second most popular programming language, for the first time knocking Java out of the top two places in RedMonk's language popularity rankings," reports ZDNet:
It's the first time since 2012 that Java is not one of the top two most popular languages in the developer analyst firm's programming language popularity list. The company's previous rankings in March placed machine-learning propelled Python in a tie for second place with Java, behind JavaScript.
RedMonk's influential programming popularity rankings are based on GitHub and Stack Overflow data. The company combines them "for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction", says RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady, who notes "all numerical rankings should be taken with a grain of salt....
"Python is the first non-Java or JavaScript language ever to place in the top two of these rankings by itself, and would not have been the obvious choice for that distinction in years past," O'Grady notes, comparing it to Perl in its heyday because it has become a "language of first resort" and the "glue" for thousands of small projects, while enjoying high adoption in growing categories such as data science...
Five-year-old systems-programming language Rust, created by Mozilla, has hit a more positive milestone, for the first time becoming the 20th most popular language in RedMonk's rankings.
Last week IEEE Spectrum also declared Python "dominated" their assessment of language popularity (compiled from 11 different online metrics), followed by Java and C (and then C++ and JavaScript).
RedMonk's influential programming popularity rankings are based on GitHub and Stack Overflow data. The company combines them "for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction", says RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady, who notes "all numerical rankings should be taken with a grain of salt....
"Python is the first non-Java or JavaScript language ever to place in the top two of these rankings by itself, and would not have been the obvious choice for that distinction in years past," O'Grady notes, comparing it to Perl in its heyday because it has become a "language of first resort" and the "glue" for thousands of small projects, while enjoying high adoption in growing categories such as data science...
Five-year-old systems-programming language Rust, created by Mozilla, has hit a more positive milestone, for the first time becoming the 20th most popular language in RedMonk's rankings.
Last week IEEE Spectrum also declared Python "dominated" their assessment of language popularity (compiled from 11 different online metrics), followed by Java and C (and then C++ and JavaScript).
Meanwhile.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile, in the real world, C/C++ and Java are the king's.
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Wouldn't boomer's be Cobal programmers? Of course, there's 4 generations in IT for every normal generation.
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Sure. For 30 years COBOL was 90% of my programming. For the last 20 years it has been 90% Python.
Obligatory COBOL joke (Score:2)
Sorry I couldn't find a better source than Twitter, but I gotta run again...
https://twitter.com/nixcraft/s... [twitter.com]
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If you have a problem with "boomers", why the fuck are you on Slashdot?
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Sonny, I'm happy to be a boomer. Very happy, lol.
I've done well in life and I'm close to retiring very comfortably. Our houses and cars are all paid off and we're still bringing in a good income. We're set.
Meanwhile, you jealous "Generation-whatevers" have to scramble to just to make the rent.
So yeah baby, throw a snappy salute when you say "Boomer"- maybe I'll hire you.
lol just kidding I'd never hire you
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Your generation has lived high off the hog by paying artificially low taxes while enjoying the benefits of runaway military spending
Yes, that was all my fault.
Why do YOU keep electing people like that? I voted against them but there were too many of YOU voting for them. .
Your generation never had the social or fiscal responsibility that your parents did.
That must be why all my homes and cars and toys are paid off, because I have no 'fiscal responsibility', lol. .
I would be curios to see where you would stand if you had to pay the extra 20% back taxes
Ah yes, I almost forgot- my "Secret 20% Debt Dividend" should be hitting my bank account right about now.... .
or how good your career would have been if your generation hadn't spent almost 10 times as much on the military as we have actually needed since the fall of the soviet union
Wow, you sure blame us for a lot, but blaming us won't fix your problems, child. I lived through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and so on, and none of it was
Re:Meanwhile.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess web developers don't live in the "real world"?
Specific industries or tasks tend to be dominated by specific languages. The reason JavaScript always dominates these lists is because, objectively speaking, there are probably more web developers than just about anything else. Python has very broad popularity in academia, science, and in many industries as a handy tool to complement other systems. Java tends to represent business software, which again is a huge development market. C++ represent things like videogames, finance, cloud / network infrastructure, heavyweight client applications, or anything else where performance is critical. And so on...
I'd really love to see these language popularity lists filtered by a specific industry or application type. I guess it's sort of entertaining to see everything lumped together in one list, but it's not nearly as useful as industry-specific rankings would be.
Re:Meanwhile.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody uses C++ for video games any more, except maybe the occassional games framework developer. Except for a few hold outs everyone has finally realized they don't need to reinvent the wheel so they use things like Unity to develop their games and deploy it to multiple platforms.
Well, that's just complete nonsense. I can speak with a bit of authority on this, being a professional videogame programmer with a few decades of experience. Unity is just one game engine among many, and is more popular among indies and hobbyists than AAA developers. There are lots of other game engines out there, many of them custom in-house tech (more common than most people realize), and just about all of them require significant amounts of game-specific C++ code.
Sure, lots of languages are used, but C++ is pretty much still the cornerstone of the videogame industry.
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There's this little development tool called the Unreal 4 Game Engine, you might want to take a peek and some of the games made with it, in C++
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And here we have a comment that was clearly written by someone who has no experience in videogame development.
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Nobody uses C++ for video games any more, except maybe the occassional games framework developer. Except for a few hold outs everyone has finally realized they don't need to reinvent the wheel so they use things like Unity to develop their games and deploy it to multiple platforms.
You know Unreal Engine is C++, right?
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Nobody uses C++ for video games any more
Citation needed?
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I guess web developers don't live in the "real world"?
As a web developer, I can say from personal experience, we don't. We use Javascript, and not only that, the most popular framework right now (React) is basically a re-implementation of PHP in the Frontend, when all that is really needed is web components.
Re: Meanwhile.... (Score:2)
"I guess web developers don't live in the "real world"?"
Nice IT in-joke right there.
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Nah
You basically have different tools for different purposes
Assembly - for people who don't live productive programming lives
C - what legitimate programmers use
C++ - when you need training wheels
C# - when you need training wheels and a babysitter
Java - when you own a Porsche but use it as a daily driver under 30mph.
Rust - when you own a Honda but drive it like a Porsche
Python - when you like to burn cpu cycles on things that should be written in C, no parts in the base language, relying on bindings.
PHP - wh
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Trying to write system utilities in a high-level language would be incredibly dumb. Replacing Python, PHP, JavaScript, etc. with C is like replacing a steam shovel with a spoon, and is also incredibly dumb. Thinking that your narrow perspective is generalizable to all software development is also incredibly dumb.
This is why I will never work for a company that reflexively promotes the longest-standing code monkeys to architectural or managerial positions. When weighing the consequences of choosing a languag
What are you supposed to use? (Score:2)
I guess C or C++, but what if your application is developing numerical algorithms?
In my "community", Matlab of all things is the first choice, but owing to its distance from the hardware, I don't think you can get valid comparisons of speed of different algorithms that way, even of relative speed taking into account that everything is slowed down.
So if you want something that holds your hand with GC's memory and gives you a reasonable place in your code when something crashed and, if you run enough ite
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C when you want your code to be a minefield.
C++ when you don't want to be constantly reinventing memory management, string concatenation, arrays, lists, etc.
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> Java has it's own world, but it's largely been excised from desktops because Oracle is a bad company, and has essentially ruined any open source things they touched over time. Better not rely on Java for business-critical software, because at some point Oracle is going to want to charge you money for it.
That already happened. Oracle poisoned java for commercial use with a license change. OpenJDK is the way to go now.
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Please tell me I am not the only one... (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's a ratings contest... Slashdot is announcing the result so people can prepare their future apps successfully.
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Stories like this cater to programmers whose career depends on not standing out, and chasing the same jobs as everyone else.
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Actually, I'd be interested in a job doing maintenance programming in Python. Easiest and best way to learn a new language is to get paid to study other people's code, and I've always been easily amused by learning new computer languages.
So has anyone got a lead for a wannabe Python maintainer? But I won't touch a hot lead. (Yes, another double entendre.) More likely a desperate lead in the case of anyone who'd consider hiring yours truly.
Re:Please tell me I am not the only one... (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed. We need to get back to what's important, like how much better vi is compared to emacs.
Re: Please tell me I am not the only one... (Score:2)
Make it vim and you got a deal
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Re: Please tell me I am not the only one... (Score:2)
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You are not the only one.
IT just keeps on reinventing the wheel, every time it does some overly loud and obnoxious group of people declare the new recycled idea as revolutionary and abuse everyone that doesn't jump on their bandwagon. It's sickening.
Java killed by Flash demolishment (Score:1)
With Flash expiring at the end of the year, Java has been pulled out of the web-plugin market too. Most things Flash and Java did are now part of HTML 5.
Re:Java killed by Flash demolishment (Score:4, Insightful)
Java on the browser has been dead for well before that. Hell, even Sun tried to pivot from Java applets to Java "Web Start" applications - full applications that you launched from the browser but weren't applets.
No, what's killing Java is simple: it's owned by Oracle.
The easy-to-find Oracle Java download warns right on the download page that it's only free for "personal use or development use." The page does link to the OpenJDK, but apparently the OpenJDK is just different enough for Java applications to not run on it. (From what I recall, a lot of this is because a surprising number of Java applications and StackOverflow answers involve using formerly-Sun-now-Oracle JDK internal implementation classes that the official Java spec is very clear are off limits for proper Java applications.)
Companies don't want to deal with the licensing hassle of dealing with Oracle, and so people are just not using Java. (OK, so that may not be true - the company I work for definitely doesn't want to deal with the licensing hassles of dealing with Oracle and was very clear that anyone who requires the Oracle JRE for whatever reason has to go through a management approval process. But I don't know that other companies are the same way. It just wouldn't surprise me.)
Then there are things like Jakarta EE being forced to change the class namespace [slashdot.org] due to Oracle. This should just be a name change and can mostly be solved with find/replace but it's just another example of Oracle-caused headaches that are making people rethink sticking with Java for future development.
I used to do nearly all my development in Java. I don't think I've touched it in the last five years, and that's basically entirely due to Oracle.
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Java is not dying and it is not "owned by Oracle".
Apache is life and striving.
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Re: Java killed by Flash demolishment (Score:1)
the list (Score:5, Informative)
1 JavaScript
2 Python
3 Java
4 PHP
5 C++
5 C#
7 Ruby
7 CSS
9 TypeScript
10 C
11 Swift
11 Objective-C
13 R
14 Scala
15 Go
15 Shell
17 PowerShell
18 Perl
19 Kotlin
20 Rust
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What about old ones like Pascal, ASM, Fortran, COBOL, etc.? :P
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I've seen it used for mostly by corporate IT departments to automate doing things on the Windows PCs they manage - stuff like deploying applications, changing Windows settings, etc. If they were managing Linux boxes they'd be using shell scripts to do the same kind of stuff. I don't really consider it a programming language, but I suppose it's technically Turing complete. And besides, if you're including CSS then I suppose Powershell makes the cut too.
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Python is everybody's side hustle (Score:3)
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What do you mean again? It hasn't NOT been screwed up for half a century or so.
Re: Python is everybody's side hustle (Score:1)
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The determined python programmer can write python code in any language.
The determined Forth programmer can write a forth compiler in Python and then have a decent language to work with.
Syntactically meaningful whitespace (Score:2, Funny)
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I use night-mode, so it's black space for me.
Rated by the number of Stack Overflow queries? (Score:2)
Swift developers don't need their hands held all of the time.
Those Python users must be lost trying to do their homework assignments:
"Can anyone tell me why doesn't this work? I need an answer by tomorrow."
I only care about what people are hiring for (Score:2)
So a languages popularity in searches and public git repos are interesting, but not too comprehensive. SQL is a very key language and not on that list. Why? Well....half because most people who use it aren't qualified to work with a DB. However, also it's a very old language I learned almost 25 years ago. I don't need to query stack overflow because
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For many modern systems, the SQL required is generated on the fly and not in the git repository as *.sql files.
Hint: read up about "object relational mappers".
You gotta go native sometimes (Score:3)
For many modern systems, the SQL required is generated on the fly and not in the git repository as *.sql files.
Hint: read up about "object relational mappers".
I know all about Hibernate/JPA.
I've been using it since version 1.0. I've contributed to the project before. 90% of the time it's just fine. However, first of all, you have to design the tables, which means you have to know the platform.
Secondly, if you care about scalability and performance or have lots of business logic at the persistence tier, you have to go native from time to time. It's a lot like spellcheck...makes life easier, but you still have to proofread and know how to spell.
For a h
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I call shenanigans, not because my favorite platform was demoted, but because Ruby is #7. Who is still using that?
It's really popular on websites with between 0-100,000 users. There are some larger companies using it, but once the project gets big enough you wish you had types to make refactoring easier.
Oh (Score:2)
It must suck then.
Popular != Good (Score:3)
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Burger King and Wendy's are neither the most popular nor the best.
Less popular != Good.
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Bud is a beer? There are many words I'd use to catogorise it, but beer is not one of them. Actually most of them would amount to something synonymous with animal waste.
Honey Crisp apples (Score:2)
Just asking, but do you like Honey Crisp apples?
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Not sure. Can't remember if I've had one. Why do they taste like bud?
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The are very popular and very sweet, so, yes.
The Twinkie is the best-tasking cake (Score:2)
A Twinkie is really a good tasting cake, McDonalds makes really tasty hamburgers, and Budweiser is a very smooth-drinking beer. Really.
These products have been engineered and have the selection effect of mass markets as a lot of people agree that those products taste pretty darned good.
If you restrict your taste experience to those three products, you are really limiting yourself in terms of the vast universe of food experiences out there. Many of those experiences, however, are an acquired taste, an
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Yes, some truth here!
Once a year I have a McDonalds cheeseburger, small fries, and an orange juice. It's really good. But if I had it every day, it would not be so good, and it would make me sick.
My point was that popularity does not mean that something is the best. Python has its place: it is great for small short-lived projects for a few people. But it is horrible if you want to build something big and complicated that requires many teams and must be maintained over time.
Just because Python is popular doe
Popularity (Score:2)
Far be it to suggest using Python when a program needs low-level access or high performance or scalability to a large project, and so on.
These surveys, however, do point to trends. If you are looking for a dynamically typed language where statements can be invoked from a command prompt, this is telling you that Python may have more "mind share" than, say,, Perl or Matlab. That it has more mind share than Matlab may be disappointing to Mathworks, but it is encouraging that a FOSS solution is getting mor
What are people using Python for anyway? (Score:3)
I see all these stories that say "Python is really popular" but what exactly are people writing in Python that is making it so popular?
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They're writing tic-tac-toe programs and solving study problems given by their professor. That's why it is popular and why there are so many questions. Same goes for Javascript, it is one of those easy accessible languages that isn't to be taken too serious that is used by a lot of beginners.
Yeah, I'm sure professional work is being done in them as well, but that's not why they're popular.
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It has very good library binding/handling/cover so a huge amount of Python is just a script that calls various libraries and prints the results. That doesn't make it a bad language. That's a coincidence.
I wonder what the popularity would be... (Score:2)
I wonder what the popularity would be if they measured...
1. Number of user application starts per day, attribute the start proportionately by LOC used to build the app.
2. Number of CPU cycles run by code that originated in the language.
3. Quantity of data processed by the language each day.
4. Memory allocated on hardware by code written in the language.
I suspect 1 would heavily favor things like JavaScript due to the web, or possibly it would favor the languages used to write the most popular phon
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I don't think 2 will favor C that much. It will probably still be Javascript, as my idling computer is probably running a lot of C code, but when there's some CPU burn going on, it's usually my browser.
As for 4, that's probably Javascript as well unfortunately.
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Evaluating 2 is tricky when it comes to JavaScript. If the script is JIT compiled and then chews up your CPU, I think you can attribute all the cycles to the JavaScript (except for the compilation phase). OTOH, if the JavaScript is run by an interpreter written in C, is the script data processed by C with CPU cycles run by C then? I'm not advocating one or the other. It's tricky, and I posted that more to make food for thought on how tricky it is to come up with good metrics. I think 4 might be a littl
Some don't take too kindly to the Python (Score:1)
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/01... [cnn.com]
One language over another is pointless (Score:2)
All well and good saying "X is better than Y." but does this take into account the distribution of those using these languages?
Back aroun 2000 the only people learning languages were those who wanted to be devs, now kids are forced-fed Python in school IT classes. Biz people looking to extract and burn through data ar eusing Pything and R ( alright not exactly a generic dev language I know ). I cut my teeth on BASIC, C and Pascal way back in the mists of time but I've learned Java and lately learning Go as
WH'Oracle Killed Java (Score:2)