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The Top Programming Languages 2024 - IEEE Spectrum
(spectrum.ieee.org)
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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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Programming
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Kinda annoying that "top" always means "most popular" for these things :-\ I guess I don't really have a specific idea of what other meaning would be best but it still seems kinda ridiculous to rank programming languages by popularity. I guess it's an engineer-brained thing to think of them as having different uses and purposes rather than being interchangeable business tools 🤮 but to me it's kinda like looking at spoken languages by popularity but you still wanna go on vacation or go live somewhere with an unpopular native language. Like, oh look, Spanish is popular so I'ma learn that but also never go anywhere I'd expect people to speak it, so I'll be in Finland or something (in my dreams, where I actually can visit places v.v ) all "Habla español? Perkele!" over and over until they throw me out 😅
Edit: Just thought to check, a cursory glance suggests "español" doesn't get capitalized in Spanish, which I don't actually know 😅 My Finnish is much better, as I know most of the common curses and a few of the words that go between them.
The ranking is perfectly fine, since some of these languages in practice are interchangeable.
You'll find business software in Java, C#, Python (and VBA, but we're not talking about that), and you'll find more system oriented software in C, C++, Rust.
Now, you're right insofar that it's misleading to lump all languages together, C and JS rarely compete, but it's a useful tool to gauge developer/employer pools. If you decide, which language to learn because you want to dip into a new niche, you might not want to learn Steve's obscure cross-paradigm language (SOCL), but e.g. Rust or whatever is popular.
Same is true for businesses. Yes, your software may be written in really good C, but it's probably a good idea to go the Java route for the next project, since it's hard to find 20 new C devs for web apps.
I'm not saying that this specific ranking here is good, its metrics are dubious at best, but the idea isn't inherently stupid.