Thursday 13 April 2017

TIOBE Index update - top 4 languages are going down

The TIOBE index shows:

  1. Top 4 languages are going down (Java, C, C++, C#)
  2. Delphi is now significantly more than 50% the size of Microsoft C#
  3. JavaScript and Delphi are keeping their share
  4. R is going up, fast

It seems that there is a general move away from mainstream languages, towards other languages like JavaScript, R, PHP etc. R is probably rising because of the need for more data analytics, and large organizations have a tendency not to make paid statistical software available to employees that need it - and even universities that train doctors are now switching to R instead of STATA, SAS, SPSS etc.

For JavaScript, I heard a good recently, which it keeps being so popular: It is one of the few programming languages, that you can use without installing any software on e.g. your company computer.

Will Delphi overtake C# and Microsoft .net? Maybe - Delphi works on mobile phones, but Microsoft .net doesn't.

My personal opinion is, that you should pick the development framework that suits your needs, with regard to productivity, legal issues, tool-supplier support, longevity expectations, deployment options etc.

2 comments:

Larry Hengen said...

Microsoft .NET development tools and languages can indeed be used to develop for mobile phones (Xamarin), and .NET native is gaining steam. Microsoft is a large company which has proven it's abilities since Balmer left. IMHO, Delphi will never be as big as C# unless Embarcadero gets their QA department in order and drops it's prices. EMBT hasn't the resources do to make it happen. Delphi is a great language, it just needs more comprehensive libraries, and some refinement due to it's age.

kmorwath said...

Yes, according to Tiobe it's also time to refresh your Visual Basic skills. It looks Tiobe boosts results of languages beginners look for. Believe me, Delphi is still used among many people (especially in some less rich areas) who are getting older version (I mean really old - often Delphi 7, because the availability of wharez downloads) to cobble together some software (often for a school project, but sometimes nasty ones).
None of them are going to spend thousands of dollars for a license, nor they're going to work in a company using Delphi. They are mostly students/hobbyists who aren't going to pay for software and need a lot of Internet perusing to write each line of code.
And that's what Tiobe sums up...