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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 loonycyborg on Monday September 16 2019, @07:59PM
C++ and Python are good in their niches. C++ is good due to compatibility with C and has a lot of features that lets you to catch many errors at compile time instead of runtime which makes it ideal for larger projects that don't need to be changed often. While python is easy to understand and modify for small pieces of code while maintaining large codebase becomes a pain due to python's relative lack of scalability and its interpreted nature. But the best thing to do is to make C++/python hybrid programs, ether via embedding or extending. That way you get best of two worlds: have often changing parts of program in python modules to avoid recompiles and do heavy lifting in C++ to have performant and maintainable core. But if you try to make language that can replace both python and C++ you'd end up with .. Java.