2018 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice AwardsThis forum is for the 2018 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards.
You can now vote for your favorite projects/products of 2018. This is your chance to be heard! Voting ends on February 12th.
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View Poll Results: Programming Language of the Year
As I do not do programming yet I just wanted to see the advantages and disadvantages of the various programming systems and listen in to the discussions.
I'm guessing that the popularity of neural networks and deep learning (which are almost entirely done in Python) are what gave Python its big push this year.
That, and maybe its popularity for scientific computing (although R only got one vote, so I don't know how strongly that community is represented here).
Python is used a lot in AI - I actually had Python forced upon me professionally, so did not start off on the best foot, but there are many modern applications where Python is winning. It is a quick language to write, easy to read and very powerful. Another big factor has been (and there are other languages for this) the fact that it is interpreted and no need for compiling. It is often used alongside .Net and other languages for software that wants to virtually achieve no down-time. My own experience of this has been for writing interfaces with different types of hardware, like phone systems among other things. The ability to add code that is easy to maintain and can just run without the software being redeployed or stopped (e.g. monitoring systems) is a big bonus.
Back to AI - this is much bigger a deal commercially now and Python is one of the popular languages that is well suited for. Once you get big commercial support, it will last a lot longer and do better. It is also true that the number of Python jobs around has exploded. I was offered a Python job 15 years ago and said "no thanks, not touching that weird language!". Then I was forced to use it 10 years later and learned it because of that. Now, I actually like it and it is my go-to language for solving certain things both at work and even at home. Good for home automation also and many niche projects, pretty much the only language widely usable for so many areas.
Versatile and accessible - accessible seems to be the issue with old-school developers, not liking young upstarts being able to produce functional code without knowing the 30+ years of learning they had to do! Which I understand is annoying for some. However, kids are learning Python at a young age - a useful skill that was not taught previously - more about thinking how to model real-world scenarios. I taught my sister Python and she has got a job working with it for doing educational programming for teaching maths and science concepts.
As dugan has said, science and other areas where they are not programming to be an intellectual exercise in how skilled a hardcore programmer you are - they can just quickly model concepts from their industry and test them. In most enterprise software I have seen a different backbone language with Python as the changeable code. It would not surprise me if Linux distros used this approach in some cases...
As one of the 9, I share your surprise. I am also surprised JavaScript was not higher. I do not care for JavaScript myself, but it is pretty popular.
I think this poll further emphasizes the subjectivity of programming language choice. Personally, I don't care what is trending at a given moment, but I do care about community support and examples. Unfortunately, I think polls and other forms of analysis do not appear to be as informative as one may like; the result varies quite a bit my the audience.
As one of the 9, I share your surprise. I am also surprised JavaScript was not higher. I do not care for JavaScript myself, but it is pretty popular.
I think this poll further emphasizes the subjectivity of programming language choice. Personally, I don't care what is trending at a given moment, but I do care about community support and examples. Unfortunately, I think polls and other forms of analysis do not appear to be as informative as one may like; the result varies quite a bit my the audience.
I was messing around with some JS this morning and wondered how it did here, and share some of your surprise that it's not more popular here. Then, I remembered that JS doesn't really have much impact on server side computing, at least not in the way that Perl or Python have for a while. It's peaking around the edges in part of the desktop, though: in Gnome/gtk, and KDE/qt components.
I am sad to see the 0 for Ada so long after the poll started
It is certainly the “least cool” of my languages. And its strong points are probably no longer as alluring in our “modern” world, as they should be. I do not do Ada. And if ever “she” gets a glimpse of “the Ruby”, both will annihilate in a violent explosion... Anyway.
Last edited by Michael Uplawski; 02-25-2019 at 06:39 AM.
Reason: Kraut2English
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