Most popular programming languages

[bert22306]

Hey guys, I just saw this from the IEEE:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programmin...uages-2022

Looks like Python is #1 and C, plus two variants of C, are #2, #3, and #4. Okay, we sort of expected that much.

QuickBasic per se does not make the list, but Visual Basic strangely enough does. So that's something. The other interesting point, Visual Basic is more popular than some real stalwarts, like Fortran, Pascal, Lisp, Prolog, and Cobol.

That's something, at least. I find it hard to believe that today, VB is more popular than the various flavors of QuickBasic, but some of you probably know better than me about such things.

[JRace]

I guess VB is still used in business for in-house software, etc. Having the MS logo on the product helps its popularity, I'm sure.

BTW, I learned just a few days ago that the .NET framework has built-in VB and C# command-line compilers. How come nobody ever tells me these things? (Not that it matters, I still don't like .NET)

[Ed Davis]

BTW, I learned just a few days ago that the .NET framework has built-in VB and C# command-line compilers.  How come nobody ever tells me these things?  (Not that it matters, I still don't like .NET)

Apparently, starting with Windows 7, Visual Basic .Net comes pre-installed with Windows.

To use it, you can make a batch file that points to it:

c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\vbc %*

If you only have 32-bit Windows, then you might need to use:

c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\vbc %*

Not sure why VB.Net doesn't get much love - I really like it!  For simple Console quick and dirty programs, it is great!

[Kernelpanic]

There is no "most popular programming language" in this sense. Computer languages have to have a purpose, that's their most important task.

There used to be "Thinking in Forth", nice, I tried it out briefly -- but this programming language was developed for controlling large telescopes. The usual "Hello World" is also possible with it.

Cobol is the language for administration: employees, salary, holidays, and so on.

The programming language C is so near to the system that only assembler is most near - except "00100110011. . ." and so on. Linux is programmed in C, and in Windows, C and C++ share the source code.

Fortran is for the rockets - Modula was supposed to replace Fortran one day, but apparently there was nobody there, and so Fortran was simply further developed in order to be able to continue using the X libraries for this. And who still knows Modula today?

And so on. . .

Oh yes, the programming language that enabled the first moon landing was not an assembler either. Margaret Hamilton:
Margaret Hamilton and the first moon landing

[mnrvovrfc]

Popularity is subjective. A popularity contest on Internet cannot be taken seriously.

What is the most popular programming language in this here world? QB64!

That's what I mean. I hate Python. I also like programming in Lua but would like to do even more such as creating a "virtual machine" to have access to its tables and regular-expression engine. But I don't do that much programming in the first place to justify it. I don't think I would have made more use of Lua if the "popularity" were reversed with Python. Now Python is everywhere, even in QB64... or is that right? I looked at the "statistics" on Github for programming languages involved in a project. Really wanted to like Terra, and there is this other "super" version of Lua called Pallene in which one of the original authors of Lua was involved, as replacement for Luajit. This Pallene I discovered today on Reddit.

Don't get me started about programming for "bash" terminal. Also tried to understand M$ Powershell, cobbled up something but stupid Windows refused to give me permission to run the script, which turned me off forever from that. I wish File Explorer gave me the option to open a directory into "cmd.exe" instead of that stupid other trash terminal.

I also dislike C and C++ but have to live with it sometimes. The way the C++ "standard" grew up has bewildered me and many other people. When I bought my first "primer" book for C++ I don't think the language had templates. C is "popular" only because people still want to write firmware modules, device drivers, command-line tools and stuff like that without having to do it entirely in assembly language. I'm not sure but "gcc" was packaged with Slackware since the very beginning 29 years ago, then Debian started a few months later and so on. There was C and the "bash" terminal language at least for programming on Linux, before installing or hunting down dependencies.

I still like Pascal, which is what my course for computer science in high school but found Free Pascal unusable in 64-bit, and I created only two or three CLI programs with the 32-bit version, one of them for the GZIP packer a lot like "_DEFLATE" and "_INFLATE" part of QB64 now.

Freebasic and Purebasic aren't very "popular" neither. The latter is payware, which puts off a good deal of hobbyists, as well as the problems some people have just getting the 3D graphics examples running. At least this is my point of view. An advantage of Purebasic is the top-notch debugger in the IDE and the standalone one. It has a few competitors such as Xojo, but it's not my thing looking over one payware product or another. I almost can't afford my Internet subscription right now. Freebasic emphasizes portability and tries to please those programmers that want OOP.

QuickBasic (or MS-DOS/QBasic for that matter) makes no list because it became extinct long ago. QuickBasic morphed into M$VB-DOS and then it and BASIC PDS v7.1 were abandoned for the first versions of VB for Windows. M$VB-dot-NET is "popular enough" only because that company forces people to use only their language product if they want to do anything worth something for Windows. A project either offers an SLN file with other things expected to be used in Visual Studio, or "configure", "make install" and scripts like that for Linux only. I'm still trying to build the "libvorbis-tools" and a few other things for 64-bit Windows (while having them in 32-bit) because I don't want to go through Cygwin and MinGW, it's too much complication and wasted disk space. Recently however I've been using Windows less often, so that is less important.

EDIT : LOL almost forgot about LISP! I installed Racket for Windows and would really like to go deep into it. Somebody wrote a QB64 program which was a LISP interpreter, pretty neat which caused me to check out Racket.

This is just my opinion. Sorry TL;DR as usual.

[JRace]

BTW, I learned just a few days ago that the .NET framework has built-in VB and C# command-line compilers.  How come nobody ever tells me these things?  (Not that it matters, I still don't like .NET)

Apparently, starting with Windows 7, Visual Basic .Net comes pre-installed with Windows.

To use it, you can make a batch file that points to it:

c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\vbc %*

If you only have 32-bit Windows, then you might need to use:

c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\vbc %*

Not sure why VB.Net doesn't get much love - I really like it!  For simple Console quick and dirty programs, it is great!

Your last sentence nails it.  An openly available c/l compiler could be VERY useful for q'n'd tasks, but all I had ever heard about until recently were MS's multi-gigabyte development systems & IDE's, which I will not allow on my machines.

As far as .NET, well, I personally don't like programs with big dependencies, and .NET, like JAVA, is a BIG mother of a dependency.  Much of my past work involved supporting older installations (both Windows and DOS) which could not run modern MS products, especially .NET, so I prefer to program for the least common denominator.
(And to anyone who says "They should have upgraded their computers!": It aint that easy.  YOU try to convince corporate bean counters and executives to pay multiple millions of dollars to upgrade their PCs, software, and everything out there "in the field" that depends on those PCs and that software.  If the setup works, they just want you to keep it working until the next generation of management has to pay for it.)

Anyway, while I don't care for VB's flavor of Basic, a well-documented c/l compiler that's already there could be quite handy in a pinch.

[Pete]

T.I. BASIC. Why people still don't program with it, I have no idea. Now if you will excuse me, I have to do a 4K backup to my cassette recorder.

Pete

[JRace]

Yeah, but who can afford a T.I. calculator?

[dcromley]

..  Oh yes, the programming language that enabled the first moon landing was not an assembler either. Margaret Hamilton:
Margaret Hamilton and the first moon landing

Thanks for that link.  She is even older than I am and I've never heard of her.  What a life!.
Another start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_H..._engineer)

[Kernelpanic]

..  Oh yes, the programming language that enabled the first moon landing was not an assembler either. Margaret Hamilton:
Margaret Hamilton and the first moon landing

Thanks for that link.  She is even older than I am and I've never heard of her.  What a life!.
Another start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_H..._engineer)

The following lines in the article are the decisive ones - the successful first moon landing is practically due to a toddler who accidentally revealed a fundamental error in the programming while playing (Google translator only):

Since both her husband and she have ambitious career plans, she brings her 4-year-old daughter Lauren to work without further ado. While the daughter plays on the office floor, the mother sits at the table and programs to herself. But again and again little Lauren starts to fiddle with the Apollo 11 control module. A circumstance to which, among other things, the following line in the Apollo code is to be thanked.
One day, when Lauren was pressing some buttons, she suddenly crashed the entire simulation program. Margaret Hamilton is shocked and sets out to troubleshoot. It quickly turns out that the reason for the crash is that Lauren selected the program module "P01" during the flight phase. This is a part of the program that should only be executed before the start.
Hamilton goes to her superiors with this realization and warns her of the mistake. But they reply that this is not a problem. The astronauts are excellently trained, such a mistake can never happen. A few months later they are taught otherwise.

On a precursor mission to Apollo 11, Apollo 8, one of the astronauts accidentally activates "P01" during the flight phase and causes the software to crash - just like little Lauren. Hamilton and her colleagues have to search feverishly for hours for a solution to get the program running again. And they ensure that the same alarm "01521" is added - and that human errors are always taken into account when programming in the future. A school of thought that still applies to many areas of computer science today.