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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Python sits firmly in top place in the newest annual ranking of popular programming languages by IEEE Spectrum.
The ranking and others like it are meant to help developers understand the popularity of languages in a world where no one really knows what programmers are using on their laptops.
IEEE Spectrum has placed Python in first spot since 2017, and last year it was just ahead of C++. The top language is given a score of 100, and all languages with lower scores are scaled in relation to it. C++ last year scored 99.7, followed by Java at 97.5, and C with 96.7.
Today, in the IEEE Spectrum's sixth annual ranking, Python's 100 is a long way ahead of runner-up Java's 96.3 score, while C is in third place with 94.4. C++ has slipped to fourth with 87.5, while in fifth is specialist statistical computing language R with a score of 81.5.
The magazine for engineering members of IEEE, the world's biggest engineering and applied-science organization, attributes Python's popularity to the vast number of specialized libraries it has, especially for developers building artificial-intelligence applications.
[...] They go on to note that Facebook, which was originally built with PHP, launched its alternative to PHP, Hack, in 2014 and since then JavaScript, TypeScript and Python have become the most popular languages for web development.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday September 16 2019, @04:11PM
To understand at least a small part of why this is the case, think about why there's a Game Boy Advance crate for Rust but no crate for Mega Drive (aka Sega Genesis) or Amiga. It turns out that anything that needs to run on m68k has to be in C, in C++, or in a mix of the two. This is because the only full implementation of Rust is an LLVM front end, and there isn't quite enough community support to maintain an m68k back end for LLVM. C and C++, by contrast, have GCC front ends, and GCC has an m68k back end.