Tweet
It is difficult to determine which programming languages are most widely used, and what usage means varies by context. One language may occupy the greater number of programmer hours, a different one have more lines of code, and a third utilize the most CPU time. Some languages are very popular for particular kinds of applications. For example, COBOL is still strong in the corporate data center, often on large mainframes; Fortran in scientific and engineering applications; Ada in aerospace, transportation, military, real-time and embedded applications; and C in embedded applications and operating systems. Other languages are regularly used to write many different kinds of applications.
Various methods of measuring language popularity, each subject to a different bias over what is measured, have been proposed:
counting the number of job advertisements that mention the language
the number of books sold that teach or describe the language
estimates of the number of existing lines of code written in the language – which may underestimate languages not often found in public searches
counts of language references (i.e., to the name of the language) found using a web search engine.
Combining and averaging information from various internet sites, langpop.com claims that in 2013 the ten most popular programming languages are (in descending order by overall popularity): C, Java, PHP, JavaScript, C++, Python, Shell, Ruby, Objective-C and C#.
Various methods of measuring language popularity, each subject to a different bias over what is measured, have been proposed:
counting the number of job advertisements that mention the language
the number of books sold that teach or describe the language
estimates of the number of existing lines of code written in the language – which may underestimate languages not often found in public searches
counts of language references (i.e., to the name of the language) found using a web search engine.
Combining and averaging information from various internet sites, langpop.com claims that in 2013 the ten most popular programming languages are (in descending order by overall popularity): C, Java, PHP, JavaScript, C++, Python, Shell, Ruby, Objective-C and C#.