Poll of languages...

Phantum

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 25, 2001
Messages
1,716
What does everyone think the 3 most commonly used programming are currently? (There's no right or wrong answer, I was just curious for input).
 
That depends a lot on what area you're talking about - Web Development? App Development? OS Development? Open Source Project?

If you want to talk about all-around coding, the 3 biggest languages right now will be C, C++, and Java. For webapps, it's a tossup between PHP and ASP.NET, but I'd guess PHP has more market share.

If you want full statistics, I reccomend the TIOBE list.
 
How about for computational sciences?

If, by "computational sciences", you mean "number crunching", I'd have to say:
Matlab, Fortran & everthing else.

Matlab is like the Visual Basic of numerical computing - it's easy & generally good enough. Fortran has tradition, decades of libraries & excellent compilers. Beyond that, I've heard of bioinformatics types using Perl. Python+Numeric is a popular open-source way to do simplified, high-level computations. C++ is always popular when performance is important. If you're doing statistical analysis, R is a powerful tool. Depending on the specific domain, you may find a culture centered around a different language (or a popular library that forces language choice).
 
If we're talking about VB6, everything.

If we're talking about VB.NET there's really nothing wrong with it, but there's really nothing right with it either...

Sorry I really did mean VB.Net

whats not right with it?
 
whats wrong with VB?

Nothing, unless we're talking VB6 and before. It just surprised me to see VB weighing in at nearly 10%.

Edit: Where is that 10% coming from? I've done almost all of my programming in an academic setting, and we are very C-, Java-, and Python-heavy. I've never used VB.NET, only VB6, 5, and 4 from back in the day. When does VB.NET get used?
 
TheSpook: outside the "academic setting" it is used very often. Every company I've worked in the last 14 years used it in some capacity, unfortunately sometimes primarily. There's a ton of legacy VB code (see below) almost everywhere.

Yeah, it looks like VB is dying. C# seems to have taken over its role. There is little to no reason for a classic VB programmer to choose VB.NET over C# (or Java).
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This might be a better way to measure a language's popularity than a search engine ranking. http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/programming-language-jobs-and-trends

I updated the data with searches on dice.com this morning. I put the count of jobs limited by title search in ( ). That should be more realistic of the primary duties than a keyword search of the title and body:

Code:
           title   title
           +body   only
           -----   -----
java       8823    (2309)
c++        4463    (766)
c#         4269    (764)
javascript 3756    (83)
VB         2827    (86)
perl       2763    (109)
php        1534    (266)
python      950    (64)
cobol       619    (138)
ruby        513    (106)
As mentioned in the link I posted, it's hard to get a count of "C" jobs, so I left it out. It would likely be in the top 5.
 
Nothing, unless we're talking VB6 and before. It just surprised me to see VB weighing in at nearly 10%.

Edit: Where is that 10% coming from? I've done almost all of my programming in an academic setting, and we are very C-, Java-, and Python-heavy. I've never used VB.NET, only VB6, 5, and 4 from back in the day. When does VB.NET get used?

I think you'll find that most college MIS programs use (or used) some version of VB for teaching business programming. Mine used VB.NET.


The company I'm with now has all current development being done in C#, but there are tons of still-running apps coded in vb6.
 
Matlab is like the Visual Basic of numerical computing - it's easy & generally good enough.
I find Matlab to be totally lacking. It's still malloc() based which makes it entirely unsuited for larger datasets. Internally it converts any variable to a double, no matter what datatype you specified.

If you deal with small data where your arrays are tiny, then Matlab may work. I routinely ran into "out of memory" errors even though Windows would report that only approx. 2GB of 8GB available were used when attempting to load and or process two-dimensional arrays of the 10k by 10k size.

Though I will admit that this was not on the Matlab 2008, it was on ... 2005 or 2006, can't quite remember. Back then I decided that Matlab is junk and haven't looked back to it.

Fortran is very big in the science community, as is C.
However, if you just want to monkey around and execution time doesn't matter, then just go with whatever is easy. Stay away from the bloat that is Java, it's the devil.
 
However, if you just want to monkey around and execution time doesn't matter, then just go with whatever is easy. Stay away from the bloat that is Java, it's the devil.

Actually Java is probably the best way to learn Object Oriented prorgamming.
 
I would think that for computational stuff... Mathmatica should be gaining traction. It is vastly superior to MatLab in every way.
 
Don't know why there is so much Java hate on these boards. It's a great language and most of the bad things people say about it are not really current anymore.
 
I would think that for computational stuff... Mathmatica should be gaining traction. It is vastly superior to MatLab in every way.

I've used both, and found they were targeted to different problems.

In my experience, Mathematica is typically used for solving problems requiring symbolic representation, whereas Matlab is for (non-symbolic) numerical computation.
 
By "solving problems requiring symbolic representation", I of course mean doing my calculus homework years ago.
 
You must have had a weird setup, I've used matlab to process gigantic amounts of data.

Matlab is sweet for doing research.

However, when people do shit like use the embedded C output or use simulink to program embedded devices, it makes me want to shoot myself.

I find Matlab to be totally lacking. It's still malloc() based which makes it entirely unsuited for larger datasets. Internally it converts any variable to a double, no matter what datatype you specified.

If you deal with small data where your arrays are tiny, then Matlab may work. I routinely ran into "out of memory" errors even though Windows would report that only approx. 2GB of 8GB available were used when attempting to load and or process two-dimensional arrays of the 10k by 10k size.

Though I will admit that this was not on the Matlab 2008, it was on ... 2005 or 2006, can't quite remember. Back then I decided that Matlab is junk and haven't looked back to it.

Fortran is very big in the science community, as is C.
However, if you just want to monkey around and execution time doesn't matter, then just go with whatever is easy. Stay away from the bloat that is Java, it's the devil.
 
no it isn't, its not even close.

Matlab and Mathematica are used for totally different purposes.

Mathematica has nothing on matlab in terms of graphing, hooking up to external DAQ hardware, and a bunch of other things.

Keep in mind, I'm not a mathematica hater, mathematica is totally awesome, but its purposes are different from what matlab is used for.

I would think that for computational stuff... Mathmatica should be gaining traction. It is vastly superior to MatLab in every way.
 
I am wondering more of the same question, for job placement purposes.

I consider myself well versed in PHP/mySQL but to be taken professionally it seems, you have to have done something really big and impressive since anyone can master the basics of PHP pretty easily. I am trying my hand at ASP.NET. The learning curve seems to be a lot higher than it was with PHP and hopefully this will be a good thing because there will probably be fewer people who are proficient at it. I just hope that it's popularity does not drop since learning something like this is a big time investment.

I really like Python and it is a niche but I spent a long time with it and nothing came of it. Hope I fare better with ASP.NET.
 
I am wondering more of the same question, for job placement purposes.

I consider myself well versed in PHP/mySQL but to be taken professionally it seems, you have to have done something really big and impressive since anyone can master the basics of PHP pretty easily. I am trying my hand at ASP.NET. The learning curve seems to be a lot higher than it was with PHP and hopefully this will be a good thing because there will probably be fewer people who are proficient at it. I just hope that it's popularity does not drop since learning something like this is a big time investment.

I really like Python and it is a niche but I spent a long time with it and nothing came of it. Hope I fare better with ASP.NET.

There are a lot of .NET developers out there and I don't see it going anywhere any time soon.
 
I am wondering more of the same question, for job placement purposes.

I consider myself well versed in PHP/mySQL but to be taken professionally it seems, you have to have done something really big and impressive since anyone can master the basics of PHP pretty easily. I am trying my hand at ASP.NET. The learning curve seems to be a lot higher than it was with PHP and hopefully this will be a good thing because there will probably be fewer people who are proficient at it. I just hope that it's popularity does not drop since learning something like this is a big time investment.

I really like Python and it is a niche but I spent a long time with it and nothing came of it. Hope I fare better with ASP.NET.

All through college, I was told that "it's not the languages you know, it's your ability to ____"

To anybody who's intelligent and is a problem-solver and wants to work with problem-solvers, this is true. To a company who needs to hire somebody right NOW and has no interest in grooming people to make them a valuable asset, it couldn't be further from the truth. for these types of companies, more emphasis is placed on your ability to code in language X than your ability to provide real value to a project.

i'm not knocking companies that follow those types of hiring practicies. they are hiring what they need right then. i am just not interested in working for them. even if i know language X or toll Y very well, i want to provide value through my ideas, not just my ability to code.

but along those lines, the openings i've seen have mostly (probably 90%) been java-related or .NET-related. i see jobs all the time requiring AJAX, J2EE, struts, and all that good stuff. i've seen an equal number of jobs requiring ASP .NET, C# .NET, etc.

however, watch out for these things. often times, what will happen is that you learn version x of one of these technologies, in version x+1, half of the stuff doesn't work anymore or else is marked as deprecated and now you have to learn a new way to do things. so knowing a specific language doesn't mean much from year to year.

edit: there are some exceptions. C hasn't changed much since the last standard, for instance.
 
Pretty much if you can code decently in one language, you can easily pick up another when/if you need to. As with any programming job, you need to keep learning new stuff or you'll get left behind.
 
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