Lately I’ve been thinking about doing something a bit adventurous: venturing into the land of the “cool” programming languages.
I really like programming in Java. However, after all the time I spent learning various aspects of the language itself and numerous useful third-party libraries, I would like to broaden my horizons. After looking around on the web I found a great summary of various methods to measure the popularity of programming languages. Out of the methods mentioned there, I liked LangPop’s approach the most, since it combines different sources into a normalized comparison. You can even modify the weights assigned to the data sources, if you feel that for example the number of projects using a specific programming language on Google Code is more relevant than the job listings on Craiglist. See the chart embedded below for the most recent normalized popularity comparison.
Github was not considered in the comparison, but the website has a page with statistics on the most popular programming languages:
Python is quite high on both of these charts, and I’ve already read some online tutorials about it, which left me quite impressed. I have yet to try the Eclipse tooling for Python, but Pydev seems to be a mature project, so I have high hopes in that regard. JavaScript is obviously very popular and one of the de facto web programming languages, so it comes as a close second on my list. Scala is an interesting one: not really popular, but apparently a very good choice for parallel programming on the JVM. Again, this is something I’ve never tried but seems to gain lots of momentum with the widespread adoption of multi-core processors.
I will try to find some time to dig into these exciting new technologies, it will be interesting to learn new approaches and paradigms beyond what Java and OOP taught me.
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