Adam Bien's Weblog
Tuesday Apr 14, 2009
April 2009: Java Still The Most Popular Programming Language
Java is the most popular programming language. C and C++ are still at the ranks two and three - what is remarkable.
Posted at 10:09AM Apr 14, 2009 by Adam Bien in General | Kommentare[6]
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You get a different picture when looking at the ohloh statistics on open source LOC:
C 1,119,934,913
Java 608,797,774
C++ 523,479,571
PHP 302,877,812
Python 93,094,625
Ruby 42,682,324
Very nice feature is that you can compare language metrics and graph loc/contributions/contributors over time there:
https://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare
Gesendet von Ralf Ebert am April 14, 2009 at 02:00 PM CEST #
@Ralf,
yes but you could express with 1 line Java about 5 lines C. So we are clear winner again :-).
thanks for the comment!,
adam
Gesendet von Adam Bien am April 14, 2009 at 03:31 PM CEST #
I'm pretty sure you can use loc to compare popularity of languages as "expressiveness" imho is determined more by api than by language syntax sugar. If you want something stable, use contributer numbers in open source projects, also from ohloh:
C 37,478
C++ 26,498
Java 24,345
Python 16,229
php 14,525
Ruby 5,676
For practical purposes it doesn't matter anyway - I think any language in the upper ranks can be used to build great software without too many maintenance hassles. If there is the slightest chance that it will last longer than a decade and get very big I would stick to the Top 10 :)
What surprised me is php on rank 4. I guess this is because of their low entry level - you don't need to grasp a lot of theory to start building something. But you'll pay the price for that later :)
Gesendet von Ralf Ebert am April 14, 2009 at 04:07 PM CEST #
"What surprised me is php on rank 4. I guess this is because of their low entry level - you don't need to grasp a lot of theory to start building something. But you'll pay the price for that later :)"
It doesn't surprise me, because of the low entry level. Especially with XAMPP, which makes it very easy to setup quite a nice stack of services. Plus there's lots of hosts that support AMP (apache+mysql+php).
I liked PHP a while ago because it made it quite easy to make server side applications.
Then recently I saw Netbeans is getting increasing support for PHP and thought I'd give it a go again, and now realize why I like Java and it's technologies (Spring, Acegi, JPA, EJB, JSF, etc. make things so much cleaner).
Gesendet von James am April 15, 2009 at 08:01 AM CEST #
According to TIOBE, Ruby has stabilized - which strikes as surprising to me.
Gesendet von Ignacio Coloma am April 15, 2009 at 11:09 AM CEST #
I think in coming days. PHP will become No1
Gesendet von sunilkumar am October 23, 2009 at 01:38 PM CEST #