The latest update to the TIOBE Index reveals notable shifts in the world of software development. While traditional programming languages remain popular, many developers are seeking out technologies that can make sense of the vast amounts of modern digital data. Legacy languages like C, COBOL, Fortran, and Assembly still have their place, but they no longer take center stage.
I really wonder about their methodology. JavaScript/Typescript is nearly ubiquitous in webdev, and has been making strides in the backend space for almost a decade now. No matter how you feel about it (yeah it’s terrible, I’ve been press-ganged into it this year) it’s a real force in the marketplace.
It’s super surprising to me it’s still behind C and C++.
C/C++ still has a huge place in firmware, microcontrollers, operating systems, drivers, application development, video games, real-time systems and so on. It’s a totally different space of programming to webdev, which might explain the surprise.
No! C is legacy! No one uses it anymore! It’s too hard!
/s
I mean it’s not hard so much as very dated and a bit shit.
I could use raw pointers in c# if I wanted to. But it’s just not a great way to do things.
C will likely have a place where low languages are required for a long time. But everywhere else there’s little reason to choose over more modern languages.
I’m not really a webdev, more backend or full stack at this point. I do know about C & C++ strong presence in firmware, OS, HPC, video gaming, and elsewhere.
But by the numbers there’s a lot more webdevs than any other kind out there, and that doesn’t even touch on NodeJS leaking into backend and elsewhere.
Not only that, but with toolchains like deno, it’s almost enjoyable
I wrote some telegram bots in deno and it’s got one of the cleanest deploy chains around, just compile to an executable for the target architecture, and SCP it over. Exec is statically linked, and so it just works
Everyone that does frontend works with JS/TS and it’s becoming popular on the backend as well. Definitely the most popular language IMO.
*in the web dev domain.
Which also has a very disproportionate representation on the web - for obvious reasons. And it is very easy to get stuck in the mentatilty that all you see if the domain you are in so you over estimate how large it is compaired to other domains. But lets not forget general application development, old large scale enterprise, embedded systems, game dev, machine learning and many more spaces where JS/TS are barely used at all.
There’s just such a massive volume of web development compared to systems programming?
I wonder how much of that actually is development and not just the gazillionth instance of some web site builders scripts.
A lot of the software that makes JavaScript web development possible is C or C++, like web servers, databases, operating systems, network devices.
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I can’t take https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ seriously: Visual Basic on place 7 of most popular programming languages right after JavaScript? More popular than Go, Rust, PHP and SQL? Haskell is more popular than TypeScript (scroll down to see other places)? TIOBE isn’t a good metric, as they only check a few websites and a few engineers:
The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular web sites Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Bing and more than 20 others are used to calculate the ratings.
If they count VBa as Visual Basic is not surprise.
You’ll be amazed on the amount of development that’s being made over MOffice in not technology companies.
I read further and there is some clarification if you scroll down to “Very Long Term History”. Visual Basic and (Visual) Basic are two entries, where Visual Basic refers to “Visual Basic .NET” since 2014. And (Visual) Basic from the 90s to 2014 is a collection of all Basic dialects, which includes Visual Basic .NET. Color me impressed how to confuse people.
There is a difference between “Visual Basic” and “(Visual) Basic” in the table above. Until 2010, “(Visual) Basic” referred to all possible dialects of Basic, including Visual Basic. After some discussion, it has been decided to split “(Visual) Basic” into all its dialects such as Visual Basic .NET, Classic Visual Basic, PureBasic, and Small Basic, just to name a few. Since Visual Basic .NET has become the major implementation of Visual Basic, it is now called “Visual Basic”.
Does SQL count as a programming language?
I know that you can write DB hooks and stuff but in my mind it still doesn’t register as programming
Huh. Nice
According to TIOBE (note can be found if you scroll down a bit):
The programming language SQL was added to the TIOBE index in 2018 after somebody pointed out that SQL is Turing Complete. So although this language is very old, it has only a short history in the index.
Legacy languages like C, COBOL, Fortran, and Assembly still have their place, but they no longer take center stage.
“Legacy” languages?
2nd: C++ 4th: C
Right…
Suppose it depends on the definition of legacy.
I mean new features are still added to C and C++.
But they are old.
TIOBE is meaningless - it is just search engine result numbers, which for many search engines are likely a wildly inaccurate estimate of how many results match in their index. Many of those matches will not be about the relevant language, and the numbers probably have very little correlation to who uses it (especially for languages that are single letter, include punctuation in the name, or are a common English word).
