Ada Beats SQL, Perl, and Fortan for #10 Spot on Programming Language Popularity Index

An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld: Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen says Ada, a system programming language whose initial development dates back to the late 1970s, could outlast similarly aged languages like Visual Basic, Perl, and Fortran in the language popularity race.

In comments on this month's Tiobe language popularity index, posted July 9, Jansen said the index has not seen much change among leading languages such as Python, C#, and Java over the past two years. But there is more movement among older languages such as Visual Basic, SQL, Fortran, Ada, Perl, and Delphi, said Jansen. Every time one of these languages is expected to stay in the top 10, it is replaced by another language, he said. Even more remarkably, newer languages have yet to rise above them. "Where are Rust, Kotlin, Dart, and Julia? Apparently, established languages are hot."
"Which one will win? Honestly, this is very hard to tell," Jansen writes, "but I would put my bets on Ada. With the ever-stronger demands on security, Ada is, as a system programming language in the safety-critical domain, likely the best survivor."

Perhaps proving his point, one year ago, Ada was ranked #24 — but on this month's index it ranks #9. (Whereas the eight languages above it all remain in the exact same positions they held a year ago...)

1. Python
2. C++
3. C
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. Go
8. Visual Basic
9. Ada
10. Delphi/Object Pascal

Rust

[Tough Love]

I will conservatively wager that Rust will just take some borrows from Ada while it continues to move ahead as the team to beat.

They'll just reinvent Ada

[drnb]

I will conservatively wager that Rust will just take some borrows from Ada while it continues to move ahead as the team to beat.

Those who don't understand Ada will reinvent Ada under a different name. :-)

Re:

[dunkelfalke]

I don't think they don't understand Ada. More like they just hate begin/end and insist on curly braces.

Re:

[phantomfive]

Better begin/end than syntactically significant white space. Wow this argument has been going on for a while.

Re:

[kertaamo]

As it happens it's already the other way around. Ada took some lessons from Rust to shore up its memory safety a few years ago.
Personally I think this is all good. Anything that aids program correctness and avoidance of silly errors is very welcome.

Re:

[phantomfive]

Has Ada usage actually been increasing recently?

Robotics?

[jkechel]

Where does that usage come from? I heard there are lots of robots on the rise in the age of AI.

Re:

[vadim_t]

TIOBE basically searches a bunch of search engines and other things for "$LANGUAGE programming", applies some magical fudge factor and calls that a result.

It's absolute nonsense. It's highly manipulable if you can convince people to use the " programming" wording. It's going to be highly affected by the appearance and disappearance of documentation websites. It will of course still pick up ancient archives of stuff that nobody is actually using today.

I have an extreme skepticism of that VB is anywhere near

Re: Robotics?

[St.Creed]

I have the opposite position here. Vb.net is superior to C# because it gives you less options to shoot yourself in the foot.

Given that devs all think they're godlike l33tmode hackers, this isn't a popular opinion. But many software devs could do more and better work with a less difficult to master language.

Re:

[vadim_t]

What do you mean by that? They both work out to the same thing just with a different syntax.

Re:

[Entrope]

What's the C# equivalent to "On Error GoTo -1", to pick one of the annoying misfeatures of VB.Net?

Re:

[phantomfive]

Possibly from recent use in military drones.

Also possibly a mis-read by TIOBE about searches for ADA because of the NVIDIA ADA architecture [wikipedia.org].

FORTRAN and Ada not similarly aged

[drnb]

FORTRAN and Ada are not similarly aged. FORTRAN, like COBOL, date from the 1950s. Ada from the 1980s.

Re:

[martin-boundary]

AND Rust IS FROM THE 2000's

Oops, my bad, Rust isn't on the list, carry on...

Re:

[Dragonslicer]

To somebody born in 2000, that probably is "similarly aged".

perhaps ...

[znrt]

Perhaps proving his point, one year ago, Ada was ranked #24 — but on this month's index it ranks #9

perhaps what it proves is that these popularity rankings are pretty meaningless:

Basically the calculation comes down to counting hits for the search query
+"(language) programming"

Re:

[sosume]

Really? I am expecting the Ada, VB and Delphi job openings to explode.

In an alternative universe, these languages have been dead for decades and no sane business would invest in writing software in those languages. This Tiobe index is a bunch of crackpot science based on early 2000's web searches. I have never seen it featured anywhere besides Slashdot, it may be the longest running trolling campaign in history.

Re:

[JamesTRexx]

I think the Tioe index is great. Ever since I used it as my random number generator the results haven't been cracked.

Re:

[bleedingobvious]

Which means the only reasonable approach is to employ a hundred or so botnets to search "VBA"....

So we can all go to hell together...

Re:

[dr_blurb]

Can we have a subdomain tiobe . slashdot . org so the monthly promotion post can be parked there?

FORTRAN

[cstacy]

I find it very difficult to believe that more people are programming in ADA than in FORTRAN. It is an absolute certainty, by orders of magnitude, that more code has been written in FORTRAN than in ADA.

(And COBOL has also been used much more than ADA ever was.)

ADA was a niche language that was never used generally by anybody. The US Department of Defense mandated its use, but the gave waivers so that in reality all the real programming languages could continue to be used. The main usage of ADA was in a few r

Re:

[Sique]

But that does not mean that this code is still maintained, or that there are many people needed to maintain it or that new code has to be added. Maybe most of the legacy Fortran and Cobol code pieces have long been capsuled and are run as some kind of black box? Or they are replaced long ago by libraries of newer code in another language? Maybe, the last error message from them has been fixed a dozen years ago, and now, no one touches the code anymore, and extensions are written in separate containers?

Re:

[excelsior_gr]

I know a SW shop where they write new Ada code. I don't know Ada, but interestingly, it's software with real-time capabilities and although I don't know if that company has military projects, they sure as hell could have because the associated hardware is dual-use. Ada is niche, absolutely, but still around and kicking, it seems.

SQL?

[theNetImp]

How is SQL even on a list of "programming" languages. it's a query language not a programming language.

Re: SQL?

[simlox]

You didn't have an API-layer in front of the DB but had different clients access the DB directly? I guess that is how it was before cloud and rest APIs. I have done the same (to avoid the extra rest API) but all in one monorepo and everything tested and updated in the same operation. And earlier around 2001 using C++ programs - also compiled and updated in one operation from a monorepo. But making the DB a fixed API used from differently versioned clients, what a mess.

Re:

[bleedingobvious]

Typically referred to as proc-ception and it is evil of the highest order.

SQL dev's imagining they're real devs by abusing an awesome tool set to replace actual, functional, code.

Typically with the added power of 10 million triggers.

Horrendous behaviour on every level.

Re: SQL?

[St.Creed]

The programming language should be tSQL or PL/SQL. Adding embedded SQL to a C program doesn't magically change the C to SQL, and stored procedures only embed SQL in their own language. A language with similarities to Pascal and ADA in the case of PL/SQL.

Re: SQL?

[KnobbyMcKnobface]

The article is useless and wrong in many ways. But SQL is definitely a Query Language, with a specific purpose that it does well. It's also apparently turing complete, and belongs in an idiotic list of "how much did people google this" as much as for example brainfuck.

Re: SQL?

[St.Creed]

It's only Turing complete in the sense that Excel is Turing complete, I.e. with massive effort you can do it, but it's not worth it.

Re:

[Mr. Barky]

Modern SQL is Turing-complete.

Interesting language

[bradley13]

I used Ada as it was just really coming out, back in the mid-80s. I reported a lot of compiler bugs. A few of them even got fixed.

It's a government language, verbose, designed by committee. You can use the language any way you like, because the committee tossed in literally every paradigm they could. OO? Real-time? Functional? Whatever you want - it may be ugly, but you can do it.

I know a guy whose small company is maintaining around a million lines of Fortran - a few years ago, they had a major effort

Re:

[kertaamo]

I would not say Ada was a government language. The US DoD asked asked for a good language to standardise on, in the hope it would get them. away from having thousands of systems all written in different languages. Ada was submitted by a small team led by French computer scientist Jean Ichbiah of Honeywell. Hardly design by committee.

Still nonsense

[vadim_t]

TIOBE is still nonsense of the highest order, not sure why anyone bothers using it.

It's some search engine counts based voodoo. Maybe not the most terrible metric possible, but I have no idea why it's the one always being discussed when there's better things one could measure at this point. Like say, GitHub.

If we want to know what's currently most popular, what we should want is measuring the actual usage. That might be projects, or commits, depending.

Scratch more popular than Rust

[thesjaakspoiler]

I think I will mention +25 years Scratch experience on my resume next time.

Free Pascal

[Latent Heat]

is a thing.

Not reliable

[simlox]

Where is typescript, c# and rust? All is as far as I have seen much more used. (TS might be under JS, though.)

It is about crypto currency. lol.

[pain]

The jump in Ada on the TIOBE index isn’t about the programming language, but the crypto token “ADA” from Cardano taking off. And TIOBE’s counting method is getting fooled here.

This is Clear Proof

[SlashbotAgent]

This is clear proof that these indexes and surveys are utter nonsense.

Clearly their sample is fucked. I LOL when I saw where Swift and Objective-C were, in relation to ADA.

Languages?

[madsh]

Formal languages are tools. Any list that has both Java and SQL is a bit suspicious. Good tools for different jobs.