A Blog by Jonathan Low

 

Mar 10, 2016

New Programming Languages Keep Emerging But Old Ones Are Hard To Displace

The advantages of new languages, designed to more productively enable emerging technologies may be outweighed by the benefits of established languages with which many more programmers are familiar.

The breadth of the installed code based on legacy languages, as well as the experience companies and developers have in working with them may ultimately  render them more time and cost efficient to use. Intangibles strike again. JL

Klint Finley reports in Wired:

New technologies like Go leapfrogged more established languages in popularity. (But)  none of these languages are close to displacing the top languages. JavaScript, which is all over the web and an important part of mobile development thanks to tools such as Facebook’s React, is still number one. Java, which is still used to build Android apps and powers big data technologies like Hadoop, is still number two.
Developers are starting to make up their minds about which new programming languages they like best.
Several new languages have been introduced in recent years, including Google’s Go, Mozilla’s Rust, the scientific language Julia, and of course Apple’s Swift. These languages shook up the tech industry as new technologies like Go leapfrogged more established languages in popularity. Now that action may be slowing down, according to new data published by IT analysis firm RedMonk.
For the past five years RedMonk has tracked the popularity of different programming languages by charting the number of questions about each language asked on the popular programming question-and-answer site StackOverflow and the number of lines of code written in each language stored on the code hosting and collaboration site GitHub. These metrics don’t tell us much about how widespread use of each language is in the commercial sector, nor how many jobs are available for developers conversant in particular language. But it does give us a way to ballpark the level of interest different technologies have garnered from developers themselves.
Not much has changed since RedMonk released its last rankings in June 2015, more than six months ago. Swift managed to creep up one spot to 17 on the list, while Go held steady at 15. Rust moved up two spots, from 46 to 48, and Julia moved up one spot to 51. None of these languages are close to displacing the top languages. JavaScript, which is all over the web and an increasingly important part of mobile development thanks to tools such as Facebook’s React, is still number one. Java, which is still used to build Android apps and powers big data technologies like Hadoop, is still number two. If Swift and Go are going to replace Objective C and Java, it’s going to take some time.
But even though old languages may reign supreme, the crop of new languages has already altered the development landscape for years to come. Even as things stabilize, developers have more choices than ever.

3 comments:

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