After two years in second place,
C has finally edged out
Java for the top spot. Staying in the top five,
Python has swapped places with
C++ to take the No. 3 position, and
C# has fallen out of the top five to be replaced with
R. R is following its momentum from previous years.
Google and Apple are also making their presence felt, with Google’s
Go just beating out Apple’s
Swift
for inclusion in the Top Ten. Still, Swift’s rise is impressive, as
it’s jumped five positions to 11th place since last year, when it first
entered the rankings. Several other languages also debuted last year, a
marked difference from this year, with no new languages entering the
rankings
.
Other notable changes include
Ladder Logic,
rising five positions to 34th place. Ladder Logic is used in
programmable logic controllers, especially those used in factories.
Although manufacturing may seem like a narrow niche for a language, its
relative popularity indicates just how big that niche really is.
HTML
also continues to be popular, rising to 16th place, despite the horror
of some previous users of the Top Programming Languages that it’s
included at all (for the record, we take a pragmatic approach and define
a programming language as a distinct syntax that is used to give a
computer instructions, even if those are just instructions on how data
should be structured; Turing completeness is not required).
On the losing side, perhaps the most surprising is that Shell
programming—a catchall term for the creation of scripts of the sort
beloved by system administrators, using shells such as
bash—has
declined in popularity, falling seven positions to 19th place. This may
reflect the development of more sophisticated systems to manage
cloud-based data centers, but we’ll have to wait to see if the trend
continues next year or if this is just a statistical fluke due to IEEE.
