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from the java-is-in-the-lead-because-of-the-caffine dept.
Think of it as a map of the rapidly changing world of computer software.
On Wednesday, GitHub published a graph tracking the popularity of various programming languages on its eponymous Internet service, a tool that lets anyone store, edit, and collaborate on software code. In recent years, GitHub.com has become the primary means of housing open source software—code that's freely available to the world at large; an increasing number of businesses are using the service for private code, as well. A look at how the languages that predominate on GitHub have changed over time is a look at how the software game is evolving.
In particular, the graph reveals just how much open source has grown in recent years. It shows that even technologies that grew up in the years before the recent open source boom are thriving in this new world order—that open source has spread well beyond the tools and the companies typically associated with the movement. Providing a quicker, cheaper, and more comprehensive way of building software, open source is now mainstream. And the mainstream is now open source.
Hmm, Perl has been declining...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:01PM
You'd expect github to mainly be populated by open-source languages and tools. How many people upload CICS exits or IMS transactions to github? There's got to be a certain amount of selection bias going on just by the nature of github itself. This survey borders on saying water is wet.
Besides, there are very few languages which aren't "open" in some sense, having ANSI standards, free-as-in-money versions, or open reference implementations of some sort. I can't really think of any language other than ColdFusion and some vertical niche languages (like SAP's ABAP) which aren't open in some way. All of C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, and so on are open in some sense. There's even an open REXX implementation. Now that C# and Swift are becoming open in some sense, that's just about all of the programming languages in the universe that are used for anything substantial. Again, water is wet and has been for a long time. You could have said the same thing in the 90s.
I'm trying very hard to think of closed languages that are used much today. Got any good ones? ABAP is closed. FORTH has had tons of free implementations. I don't think there's ever been any kind of ColdFusion clone of any sort (well, I hope not, yuck). COBOL is an open standard from CODASYL. (No one in their right mind would write a COBOL compiler, but nothing is stopping them.) I guess niche things like Roku's BASIC-like whatever is closed. (But how many Roku apps are on github?) PL/I (still widely used in Europe) is closed, I think. I don't think there is an ANSI/ISO standard. (Is there any PL/I on github at all?) Even the closed Delphi language has a free implementation of Pascal with Delphi object extensions. Help me out, I'm trying to think of something closed that's widely used today. I guess Visual Basic is still widely used.
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