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Programming Popularity

POSTED 22nd September 09, by Mike Griffiths.

When undertaking a new web development project one of the first things we do during the planning stages is decide which programming language(s) would be best suited for the job. All of the different languages have different advantages and disadvantages. C, for example, is extremely stable and will run on nearly any machine natively (without anything needed to be installed), but it requires the programmer to be far more strict in their coding and often requires far more work to get the same result. Java is similar to C but it does require the Java runtime to be installed, which is available for most systems. Like C, Java is a low-level programming language, which means it can be used to control the actual behaviour of your computer, car, dvd player, tv, microwave, kettle, or anything. Higher level programming languages like C#, Visual Basic, Python and Perl generally take less time to create the same results but are often far less stable. Web languages such as PHP and ASP are used only for the web (usually) and are excellent for quick turn around times.

At Reckless New Media we are proficient in all of the main programming languages so your project will benefit from low costs and the fastest turnaround time possible.

The language that is used the most on the web is PHP. The web site you are currently viewing is written in PHP. PHP is free to develop in, is very fast, very stable and is very high level, which means it requires less code to produce the same result.

A company known as TIOBE, who were founded in 2000, compile statistics on the usage of different programming languages. This years results show that the use of PHP has risen from the 5th most used language up to the 3rd most used language, behind only Java and C. Java and C are both general use languages, as mentioned earlier you can find them being used just about anywhere, from your car to your kettle, and of course your computer. PHP's market share has increased by just under 1%, which is a phenomenal amount in only a year. I believe this sudden growth is due to more applications moving to the web, and away from traditional computing methods. I believe this trend will continue for some years to come.

For those of you who are interested, the top 10 languages are listed below, in popularity order:

1. Java
2. C
3. PHP
4. C++
5. Visual Basic
6. Perl
7. C#
8. Python
9. JavaScript
10. Ruby

You may notice that ASP.Net is not in the list. A common mis-conception with ASP.Net is that it is a programming language. ASP.Net is infact a framework for other languages, not a language itself. Languages like C#, Visual Basic and VBScript are used to develop on ASP.Net.

There are other trends that have become apparent from TIOBE's work. Objective-C is a language that's been around for a while. It's rank has increased 42 places since last year. This huge jump is due to the increase in popularity of the iPhone, with Objective-C being the language of choice for iPhone apps. Pascal used to be a big player, but is now quite out-dated - this said it has recently become quite popular again, possibly due to applications such as Skype.

TAGS: PHP, PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES