Several new languages have been introduced in recent years,
including Google’s Go, Mozilla’s Rust, the scientific languageJulia, 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.
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