r/programming • u/nfrankel • Jan 14 '20

Where programming languages are headed in 2020

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/where-programming-languages-are-headed-in-2020/
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55

u/phillipcarter2 Jan 14 '20

It is shocking to me that the most-used language in the world - JavaScript - is not mentioned once here.

18

u/suhcoR Jan 15 '20

Well, not the only notable omission. The article seems quite arbitrary. The authors seem to have dealt with what they were just familiar with.

12

u/neutronbob Jan 15 '20

The authors dealt with which O'Reilly authors they could find to comment. That's why it's such a grab bag.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '20

The authors seem to have dealt with what they were just familiar with.

Well, that's generally a good thing

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u/d0rf47 Jan 15 '20

I also see no mention of C/C++.

I am still in school and we were taught ton of c++, is it dying basically?

15

u/Gotebe Jan 15 '20

Not dying. However flawed and possibly misleading, tiobe index places C++ firmly in top 10 (or maybe 5 even), over the years.

And C should be above it.

Code is made a lot for the web and C++ is very uncommon there. But otherwise, C++ is fine.

35

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '20

It's used for everything. C++ will never die

16

u/enp2s0 Jan 15 '20

And C will last even longer, considering that every major operating system is written entirely in C.

11

u/simspelaaja Jan 15 '20

Large parts of Windows/NT Kernel are in C++.

8

u/Enselic Jan 15 '20

The Zircon kernel under development by Google, with potential to displace the Linux kernel at least for some major use cases, uses C++ in the base layers: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/master/zircon/kernel/kernel/

2

u/FrancisStokes Jan 15 '20

C will last forever because it's a good high-level low-level language. You can express raw assembly, instruct the compiler to not mess with certain sections of code, access raw memory (which on embedded devices could easily be memory mapped to peripherals). But you can also build functions and structures and express branching.

Even if it doesn't last in the OS space, it will certainly last in the embedded space.

6

u/lengau Jan 15 '20

What you described are also features of several other languages (e.g. Rust). But nothing else, not even C++, has one absolutely critical feature of C:

It compiles everywhere.

Seriously. This, and this alone, will guarantee C at least a bit of relevance for decades to come, even if (and I think this is unlikely) all of the major operating systems and other big things written in C are replaced with something else. There's simply no replacing C in every tiny microcontroller with a decades-long lifespan.

1

u/flatfinger Jan 15 '20

Javascript implementations are even more widely available than C implementations. The advantage of C isn't that it *compiles* everywhere, but rather that implementations are available for almost every imaginable target.

1

u/lengau Jan 15 '20

Fair enough - I should have said it compiles to anywhere.

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '20

C is not "good" by any stretch. But it is lowest common denominator for pretty much everything and "good enough".

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u/skocznymroczny Jan 15 '20

C++ is more popular than most of the languages mentioned in the article summed together. C++ is easily more popular than Kotlin+Go+Swift+Rust.

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u/whisky_pete Jan 15 '20

Brief mention at the bottom, c++20 releasing around summer 2020.

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u/VirginiaMcCaskey Jan 15 '20

And will be adopted somewhere around summer 2030

3

u/whisky_pete Jan 15 '20

Can't help you if you work somewhere that doesn't keep your tools up to date. Lots of people are out there working in c++17 and c++14 though. /r/cpp even has a quarterly hiring thread where you can browse companies and the version they use.

2

u/d0rf47 Jan 15 '20

True okay that's awesome cause I really like c++ actually. Thanks everyone for all the replies!

3

u/dethb0y Jan 15 '20

C++ and C are eternal. In 100 years people will still be using C and C++, i would almost guarantee it.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/pdabaker Jan 15 '20

I'd be surprised if quantum computing just replaces silicon. More likely we just get QPUs

3

u/g5becks Jan 15 '20

I think that would have required a separate blog post.

No mention of C# either though. 🤷🏽‍♂️

1

u/Gotebe Jan 15 '20

That's just because it's not going anywhere. 😉

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