Ada Beats SQL, Perl, and Fortan for #10 Spot on Programming Language Popularity Index (infoworld.com) 73
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...)
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...)
- Python
- C++
- C
- Java
- C#
- JavaScript
- Go
- Visual Basic
- Ada
- Delphi/Object Pascal
Rust (Score:3)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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. :-)
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I don't think they don't understand Ada. More like they just hate begin/end and insist on curly braces.
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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.
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I thought it wasn't quite that. Ada/SPARK is memory safe, and almost certainly more correct than Rust code as well. I gather that it was somewhat less flexible, since you basically had to avoid pointers with SPARK because the theorem prover couldn't deal with them. They added a borrow checker to it modelled on Rust, which allows a lot of useful pointer based code to be provably correct.
Robotics? (Score:3, Interesting)
Where does that usage come from? I heard there are lots of robots on the rise in the age of AI.
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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? (Score:2)
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.
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What do you mean by that? They both work out to the same thing just with a different syntax.
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What's the C# equivalent to "On Error GoTo -1", to pick one of the annoying misfeatures of VB.Net?
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VB.Net has explicit syntax that follows C#'s try/catch/finally: https://learn.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com]
They added that as the recommended replacement for Visual Basic's legacy "On Error" -- so I don't think your suggestion holds up. Having vaguely similar effects doesn't mean the two "both work out to the same thing just with a different syntax" any more than being Turing complete means different languages are fundamentally equivalent.
Experience humbles you...Easy of use emboldens (Score:2)
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.
All evidence points to the contrary. The reason VB, PHP and Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe's ColdFusion either died or had their standing greatly diminished...and hopefully soon the node.js ecosystem will join them.... were less based on technical merits and more due to the horrible mistakes of the amateur community putting a bad taste in the mouth of the users. Equally, Java is a far superior language than most people know, but they had a bad experience with applets in 1996 and thus we hear a million clueless
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I have an extreme skepticism of that VB is anywhere near the top 10.
Excel runs the world, and Excel uses VBA. That's where it's being used.
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While I agree with your assessment, they lump VBA together with "classic" Visual Basic [tiobe.com] which is not in their top 10.
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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 (Score:5, Informative)
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Oops, my bad, Rust isn't on the list, carry on...
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Re: FORTRAN and Ada not similarly aged (Score:2)
perhaps ... (Score:5, Informative)
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:perhaps ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I think the Tioe index is great. Ever since I used it as my random number generator the results haven't been cracked.
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Delphi/Lazarus is one of the most stable GUI development platforms. MS changes its UI engine & tooling more often than I change my underwear, and MS killed the other commercial GUI competitors using bundling and size.
Delphi/Lazarus may not be esthetically shiny and new, but it works and has been working. Most complaints are for fairly obscure needs. S
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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...
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Can we have a subdomain tiobe . slashdot . org so the monthly promotion post can be parked there?
Re: perhaps ... (Score:2)
Which, as you've rightly noticed, doesn't describe popularity at all.
It describes how difficult to understand and write a language is, how much much support its programmers need.
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And perl went from 30 to 11, which is absurd.
FORTRAN (Score:3)
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 real-time programming projects for military machines/weapons for a brief time in the late 80s. Nobody else picked it up. It was a nice idea.
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SQL? (Score:2)
How is SQL even on a list of "programming" languages. it's a query language not a programming language.
Re: SQL? (Score:2)
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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? (Score:2)
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? (Score:1)
Re: SQL? (Score:2)
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.
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Modern SQL is Turing-complete.
Re: SQL? (Score:2)
SQL is a programming language, just a specialised one. There are more types of programming language than general-purpose, multi-paradigm languages you are seemingly the most aware of.
SQL is what we call a declarative query language.
Plus, its paradigm can be extended with stored procedures.
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Interesting language (Score:4, Interesting)
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 to at least move it to a more modern dialect. Attempts to re-engineer it into C++ have been mostly futile, because too many little things are different (array handling, for one). Old languages never die - they just accumulate.
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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.
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The design was picked by a committee, and subsequent changes have been made by committee.
FWIW, the main reason Ada didn't succeed was that it was too expensive. Even Gnat required a more powerful computer than most folks had access to. And it was also the most complicated language around. But the REAL problem was that the length of the string was part of the type, and different types couldn't be the same argument in a function. There was a work around, but it was clumsy. The default string should have
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PL/I says hello - it makes other languages look simple by comparison.
Standard Pascal had the same design decision (a string was a PACKED ARRAY OF CHAR), yet Pascal dialects managed to have a brief moment in the sun as the preferred language for Mac and Windows development b
Still nonsense (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
I think I will mention +25 years Scratch experience on my resume next time.
Free Pascal (Score:2)
is a thing.
Not reliable (Score:2)
It is about crypto currency. lol. (Score:2)
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.
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This is Clear Proof (Score:1)
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? (Score:1)
You have it all wrong... (Score:2)
Ada was created primarily for the DoD. It's used to write complex weapons control systems, etc...
Think of it like the Pentagon Pizza counter. When Ada pops up on Tiobe's list, we're going to war!
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IIRC, the DoD has pretty much moved away from Ada. They couldn't find enough good programmers.
Perl and Fortran... (Score:2)
Any popularity index that still mentions Perl and Fortran can't even hope to be seen as credible.
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These language popularity contests are meaningless anyway, they don't measure real life usage.
People interested in Rust ... (Score:2)
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I hear that naval jelly works to rid navel jam.
Ada is fine, as is Fortran, for different things (Score:2)
First, the Tiobe index is rubbish, mainly counting how many times people ask about a language on social media. It doesn't measure usage popularity.
I've been a developer on both Ada and Fortran compilers, though my Ada experience ended around 1985, while I continue to be involved with Fortran today. I love Ada as a language - I used to say that if you could get an Ada program to compile, it would probably work. Ada also strongly influenced important features in modern Fortran, including modules and submodule
maybe (Score:2)
Maybe the rankings should be based on dollar value, not number of lines or practitioners.
I pity those Visual Basic writers (Score:2)
Those poor souls. Can you imagine having to do that every day?
And also, VB and FORTRAN are not "similarly" anything.
VB, Ada, Delphi? (Score:2)
Last 3 are questionable. Really I'd expect FORTRAN (weather modeling), Matlab/Simulink, Rust, R, Lisp and VHDL/Verilog there higher than these three.
Is there really so much legacy apps still in active maintenance?
Fishy (Score:1)
Doesn't Tiobe have a small investigative team to find out why the grand shift? A shift that big with a legacy language is either a surprising trend or a boo boo, most likely the latter.