Python Surges in Popularity. And So Does Perl (techrepublic.com)
- Reference: 0178700344
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/16/0658254/python-surges-in-popularity-and-so-does-perl
- Source link: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-tiobe-commentary-august/
"We thought Python couldn't grow any further, but AI code assistants let Python take yet another step forward."
> According to recent studies of Stanford University (Yegor Denisov-Blanch), AI code assistants such as Microsoft Copilot, Cursor or Google Gemini Code Assist are 20% more effective if used for popular programming languages. The reason for this is obvious: there is more code for these languages available to train the underlying models. This trend is visible in the TIOBE index as well, where we see a consolidation of languages at the top. Why would you start to learn a new obscure language for which no AI assistance is available? This is the modern way of saying that you don't want to learn a new language that is hardly documented and/or has too few libraries that can help you.
TIOBE's "Programming Community Index" attempts to calculate the popularity of languages using the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. It nows gives Python a 26.14% rating, which [2] TechRepublic notes "is well ahead of the next two programming languages on this month's leaderboard: C++ is at 9.18% and C is 9.03%." But the first top six languages haven't changed since last year...
Python
C++
C
Java
C#
JavaScript
Since August of 2024 SQL has dropped from its #7 rank down to #12 (meaning Visual Basic and Go each rise up one rank from their position a year ago, into the #7 and #8 positions).
In the last year Perl has risen from the #25 position to #9, beating out Delphi/Oracle Pascal at #10, and Fortran at #11 (last year's #10). TIOBE CEO Jansen " [3]told TechRepublic in an email that many people were asking why Perl was becoming more popular, but he didn't have a definitive answer. He said he double-checked the underlying data and found the increase to be accurate, though the reason for the shift remains unclear."
[1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
[2] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-tiobe-commentary-august/
[3] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-tiobe-commentary-august/
Great question... (Score:3)
Why would you start to learn a new obscure language for which no AI assistance is available?
Soon to be "why learn anything that isn't already in the AI model, you'll have to research it on your own".
Wasn't that a theme from the paper "Foundation", where someone was telling everyone else that all is already known and you just have to find the book it's written? And wasn't that the mark of the end of the Great Empire?
Re: (Score:2)
At one point programmers used to brag that they could learn any programming language in a day or a week.
Now apparently there's a substantial portion of the programming population that can't learn any language without AI assist.
I mean... (Score:1)
Perl is awesome. It doesn't hurt that they finally got their finger out of their eye and are moving forward.
Re: (Score:2)
YES! Perl really shot themselves in the foot with serious consequences... Although Roku has interesting ideas and abilities it was almost an insurmountable task which made the whole situation so much worse. It would have been better as a different language from the start... and likely would have died early since a lot of talented Perl people were spent on Roku being a massive upgrade of Perl.
It's still too technical and hacky for large projects; which means that you need a team of people who are all on the
Re: (Score:2)
Good point.
Just for fun yesterday I took some Java code I wrote, about 10 lines and converted it to Perl. It ended up being 1 line and easier to understand than Java. I've found the same thing with PHP--meaning Perl was shorter and easier to understand than PHP.
I was thinking about a website I worked on 30 years ago. The Perl code is still working without modification (Perl 4 to 5.38). The supporting languages have had to be modified over the years to keep going. Gotta love Perl.
It is all AI driven (Score:2)
The fact is if you want to do nearly anything in AI these days at the programming level you end up using Python for it. All the API clients are supported that way.
Before taking my current gig which is of course all about AI I barely touched Python. Now it is pretty much all I do. The work is more interesting than the language even though it is an excellent language in many ways.
AI is the killer app for pytPon.
Re: (Score:2)
And that leads to the crucial point:
In the modern world, we don't choose languages based on language features. We choose them based on available libraries. [1]Forth [wikipedia.org] is the best language, but it doesn't have NumPy bindings.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)
Re: Seems unlikely (Score:2)
I'm doing meteorological data analysis. Want to bet what language I'm doing it in? Python. Because that's where the libraries are for the dataset I'm playing with.
Are there other libraries in other languages? Maybe. Are they anywhere near as popular? Significant doubts abound.
It's much easier to pick the same tooling as the core data you're going to use is built around. Thankfully in my case extracting the data is about all I need from Python.
Python is heavily used in data analysis, particularly from resear
Re: (Score:2)
If there is a specification other than "it works" then that's stupid.
Perl? (Score:2)
The end times must be upon us.
Though, I will say it was useful when I set up my companyâ(TM)s first duct-tape-and-zip-tie CDN back in the late 90s for software downloads. All I was given was access to three distributed sun boxes that I could stash our binaries on, and run cgi scripts on Apache. I was able to redirect our paying customers to these servers and still have reasonable (but not perfect) confidence the files were hard to get for non paying customers. It used a simple token passing scheme.
Re: (Score:2)
I wrote the chip implementation flow (front to back; synthesis, DFT, place-and-route, physical verification, etc.) that is used by my employer in Perl.
First iteration was circa ~2012, and it is still used everyday to this day (albeit with a LOT of updates over the years)
Screw Python and that whitespace nonsense
Was not TIOBE based on search frequency? (Score:3)
AFAIR the TIOBE index is computed based on how frequently questions regarding the different programming languages are observed. With the advent of LLMs, such questions will be placed less and less to classical search engines, but will be answered by LLMs. I wonder whether the companies hosting LLMs-as-a-service will let the makers of TIOBE look into the question statistics of their users.
Perl is what Java wanted to be (Score:2)
Runs on everything from VMS clusters to Alpine Linux. Has libraries for *everything*. Can be structured and enterprise, or quick-hack to fix a devops issue. Perl is beautiful and timeless.
O Really (Score:2)
And here was me last night looking at my shelf of O'Reilly Perl books and wondering whether I'll ever refer to them again. I don't suppose with AI "help" available at the click of a mouse that there's much of a second hand market for them.
What is (Score:1)
Perl?
Re: (Score:3)
Something you don't cast before the swine.