Programming

16996 readers

93 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

The Top Programming Languages 2024 - IEEE Spectrum (spectrum.ieee.org)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Direct link to the table, for those who block off-site scripts:

https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/19114866/embed?auto=1

Some of the labels don't seem to show up unless you zoom out.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Kinda annoying that "top" always means "most popular" for these things :-\ I guess I don't really have a specific idea of what other meaning would be best but it still seems kinda ridiculous to rank programming languages by popularity. I guess it's an engineer-brained thing to think of them as having different uses and purposes rather than being interchangeable business tools 🤮 but to me it's kinda like looking at spoken languages by popularity but you still wanna go on vacation or go live somewhere with an unpopular native language. Like, oh look, Spanish is popular so I'ma learn that but also never go anywhere I'd expect people to speak it, so I'll be in Finland or something (in my dreams, where I actually can visit places v.v ) all "Habla español? Perkele!" over and over until they throw me out 😅

Edit: Just thought to check, a cursory glance suggests "español" doesn't get capitalized in Spanish, which I don't actually know 😅 My Finnish is much better, as I know most of the common curses and a few of the words that go between them.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago

The ranking is perfectly fine, since some of these languages in practice are interchangeable.

You'll find business software in Java, C#, Python (and VBA, but we're not talking about that), and you'll find more system oriented software in C, C++, Rust.

Now, you're right insofar that it's misleading to lump all languages together, C and JS rarely compete, but it's a useful tool to gauge developer/employer pools. If you decide, which language to learn because you want to dip into a new niche, you might not want to learn Steve's obscure cross-paradigm language (SOCL), but e.g. Rust or whatever is popular.

Same is true for businesses. Yes, your software may be written in really good C, but it's probably a good idea to go the Java route for the next project, since it's hard to find 20 new C devs for web apps.

I'm not saying that this specific ranking here is good, its metrics are dubious at best, but the idea isn't inherently stupid.