Will AI Mean Bring an End to Top Programming Language Rankings? (ieee.org)
- Reference: 0179571904
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/09/28/1823244/will-ai-mean-bring-an-end-to-top-programming-language-rankings
- Source link: https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2025
> And with an AI assistant like Cursor helping to write code, the need to pose questions in the first place is significantly decreased. For example, across the total set of languages evaluated in [2]the Top Programming Languages , the number of questions we saw posted per week on Stack Exchange in 2025 was just 22% of what it was in 2024...
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> However, an even more fundamental problem is looming in the wings... In the same way most developers today don't pay much attention to the instruction sets and other hardware idiosyncrasies of the CPUs that their code runs on, which language a program is vibe coded in ultimately becomes a minor detail... [T]he popularity of different computer languages could become as obscure a topic as the relative popularity of railway track gauges... But if an AI is soothing our irritations with today's languages, will any new ones ever reach the kind of critical mass needed to make an impact? Will the popularity of today's languages remain frozen in time?
That's ultimately the larger question. "how much abstraction and anti-foot-shooting structure will a sufficiently-advanced coding AI really need...?"
> [C]ould we get our AIs to go straight from prompt to an [3]intermediate language that could be fed into the interpreter or compiler of our choice? Do we need high-level languages at all in that future? True, this would turn programs into inscrutable black boxes, but they could still be divided into modular testable units for sanity and quality checks. And instead of trying to read or maintain source code, programmers would just tweak their prompts and generate software afresh.
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> What's the role of the programmer in a future without source code? Architecture design and algorithm selection would remain vital skills... How should a piece of software be interfaced with a larger system? How should new hardware be exploited? In this scenario, computer science degrees, with their emphasis on fundamentals over the details of programming languages, rise in value over coding boot camps.
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> Will there be a Top Programming Language in 2026? Right now, programming is going through the biggest transformation since compilers broke onto the scene in the early 1950s. Even if the predictions that much of [4]AI is a bubble about to burst come true, the thing about tech bubbles is that there's always some residual technology that survives. It's likely that using LLMs to write and assist with code is something that's going to stick. So we're going to be spending the next 12 months figuring out what popularity means in this new age, and what metrics might be useful to measure.
Having said that, IEEE Spectrum still ranks programming language popularity three ways — based on use among working programmers, demand from employers, and "trending" in the zeitgeist — using [5]seven different metrics .
Their results? Among programmers, "we see that once again Python has the top spot, with the biggest change in the top five being JavaScript's drop from third place last year to sixth place this year. As JavaScript is often used to create web pages, and vibe coding is often used to create websites, this drop in the apparent popularity may be due to the effects of AI... In the 'Jobs' ranking, which looks exclusively at what skills employers are looking for, we see that Python has also taken 1st place, up from second place last year, though SQL expertise remains an incredibly valuable skill to have on your resume."
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2025
[2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2024
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_representation
[4] https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-index-2025
[5] https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-methodology-2025
I hope so (Score:2)
If it does it will be one of the many significant advances to our civilization it will make. Or already has made.
Re: (Score:2)
i'm afraid you're overestimating the impact. decrement of language rankings slop will be more than offset by increment of other sorts of slop. the entropy of clickbait, slashvertisements and duplicates in closed slashdot systems can only ever increase. llm popularity rankings coming soon!
If we use AI generated code (Score:2)
the prompt will be the source code and the LLM a compiler step.
Re: (Score:2)
And judging from the current situation with GPUs, graphics card drivers will need to ship with an online-connection to some LLM service in order to translate the prompts for shaders included in video games into GPU specific code while the game runs. Occasional frame times up in the minutes will be normal when the LLM service is under heavy load.
I think it's safe to say (Score:2)
If "AI" accomplishes that, it'd be universally considered a significant gain for humanity.
But, unfortunately, I think those imbecilic TIOBE rankings will keep getting posted to Slashdot ad infinitum . Even if AI wipes out humanity.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe AI will take over posting rankings after we're gone?
I can see it now, 2 AI agents in a pissing match where one claims Flugnarg is better because it used it to program the T2000 that wiped out 40,000,000 humans while the other AI agent claims the T2000 is a dumpster fire because it's written in Flugnarg and that the Z8000 it wrote in Nargflug is so much 733ter because it exterminated 40,000,000 humans 1 second faster than the T2000.
Personally, I think Flugnarg is more quantum stable than Nargflug, so i
SO AI (Score:2)
I prefer StackOverflow answers over AI responses to questions, because they are peer-reviewed and occasionally corrected or adjusted to specific conditions, and I know that someone actually tried the solution(s) provided instead of it being some amalgamation of various possible solutions.
Re:SO gt AI (Score:1)
meant the subject to be "SO > AI" ; ugh
Re: SO AI (Score:2)
The AI feels a lot less judgemental when asking it questions. I do wonder what will happen to more modern problems if the training data is not available.
Language Popularity studies were always bogus (Score:2)
What exactly do they measure? SLOC produced? Job Postings? GitHub commits? Articles in magazines? Job openings that mention the desired language(s)?
(For the latter, I remember a company using job postings in the LA Times, their local ppaper, as their "independent scientific" rationale for selecting their preferred programming language. I responded, "By that measure, shouldn't you be developing this system in HTML, since that's listed as a programming language in the job openings you surveyed?" Then I
Re: Language Popularity studies were always bogus (Score:2)
I've seen the same at MDA... (Space company). The language selection process had some requirements, pros cons, but in the end the selection was largely disconnected from all of those.
Digression - I can't blame this on AI, but (Score:3)
Does anyone else remember (and miss) when Slashdot summaries were, you know, SUMMARIES ?
Take a look at the site's front page today, then compare it to how each submission looked [1]in 2005 [archive.org] or [2]in 2015 [archive.org]. Even [3]in 2020 [archive.org], it wasn't too bad...
But now we routinely get long screeds - this current submission being a case in point - which typically contain most (or sometimes all!) of the article... AND which often is then padded out by copious additional rambling from the submitter.
Even today, when you submit a story, the submission form states that "[m]ost stories on Slashdot are less than 120 words; brevity is the soul of wit." So what gives?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050207232829/http://slashdot.org/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150309235337/http://slashdot.org/
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20200207084132/https://slashdot.org/
Of course not (Score:2)
Arguing about which language is best will never go away. It's too much fun.
On that note, C is obviously the immortal top language. *drops keyboard*
A different related worry (Score:3)
I have a different related concern: As AI becomes used more and more for coding, since those AIs are trained on the massive amount of code on the internet, it will make it much harder for new languages to get attention, since they will not start off with any strong AI assistance. This may lead to effective indefinite lock-in of current major languages.
SQL drops (Score:2)
Prediction -- programming with SQL will be replaced by natural language prompts. And SQL's rank as a language will drop.
Nonsense (Score:3)
As someone who wishes LLMs could code better, no, we are nowhere near there yet for anything non-trivial. The models vary, but when the number of distinct responsibilities hits ~20, the models start generating very poor logic. There's a reason why all the codegen tools have some central "toolkit" like Supabase. We are nowhere near the point where LLMs can take over all coding. I'd say for web dev tasks, they're getting close to 80% of the way there, but that last 20% is the hard parts and it will take 4x longer than the 80% easy-kill parts to take over. If you go down a few layers to performance-critical code, they're well under 30% of the way there. Another reason why this will not happen by 2026 is that coding is not the hardest part of software, figuring out what humans really want is.
Right now, LLMs can do a good amount of the low-value work that a good template or snippet library would cover. They're also decent at pinpointing bugs because they're very efficient spaghetti throwing machines, throwing entire boxes of noodles at the wall faster than humans. However, they're not very good at fixing bugs without causing regressions.
Want to see a model fall on its face? Ask any codegen tool to write you an inference engine for the H200 in PTX, you're not going to get very far. It output something that looks like PTX code, but it'll be, well, some novel form of pseudo-code that doesn't compile and is fundamentally broken.
AI Focusing on specific languages (Score:2)
I am seeing the same languages focused on over and over for LLMs: rust, golang, python, c++, bash, typescript, java
if these are the languages LLMs are universally best at, that's probably what people will continue to write things in, as LLMs work best at those. Claude and GPT5 are phenomenal at writing rust, python, golang, even terraform
Re: (Score:1)
> Claude and GPT5 are phenomenal at writing rust, python, golang, even terraform
"Phenomenal" in the sense of "phenomenally inefficient and unreliable", yes.