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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday August 22 2015, @04:03PM   Printer-friendly
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...


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  • (Score: 1) by purpleland on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:13PM

    by purpleland (5193) on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:13PM (#226330)

    Java has evolved quite nicely even though it isn't particularly elegant. Recent closure/functional programming features are very nice. But what makes Java great is:

    • Rich set of libraries (mostly open source) available to do pretty much anything you desire.
    • Powerful frameworks to structure complex projects, rapid application development. E.g. Spring and Play.
    • Mature JVM. Cool esoteric languages built on JVM that will integrate will Java and aforementioned libraries.

    Feeling bored? I recommend tinkering with the Play framework [playframework.com], and Scala language - good place to learn a bit about MVC, and if you already know MVC I think you'd wished you'd found it sooner. Learn a bit about their Reactive Manifesto, and you might find most other development environments are still in the stone age.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Nerdfest on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:21PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:21PM (#226355)

    If you like some of the features of Java but hate the boilerplate code, try Groovy. You can mix it seamlessly with Java and it adds a pile of the features that really should have been there earlier, including generated getters and setters, traits, closures, fantastic collection handling, and a variety of other goodies. I'll generally use it these days for at least model objects to avoid the ridiculous boilerplate code required. I was originally looking at pre-compile annotations to clean up some of the tedious stuff, but Groovy is a way better solution.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Post-Nihilist on Saturday August 22 2015, @09:49PM

      by Post-Nihilist (5672) on Saturday August 22 2015, @09:49PM (#226405)

      Groovy is also wonderful for shell scripting, I now use it instead of Perl. But if you do use groovy as a stand-alone script engine, use the interpreted mode of java, unless your script execution time is so long the 1 or 2 seconds of AOT compiling is negligible. (the jvm flag to use is -Xint)

      --
      Be like us, be different, be a nihilist!!!