Simon’s Blog

My last blog entry about getting kids into programming languages got me thinking about the programming languages I’ve learnt over the years. I’ll be writing an entry about that in a few days. However, thinking about programming languages made me wonder what the most popular programming languages are in the Open Source community. SourceForge seems the place to look to get a good feel for this.

On SourceForge, as of today, the projects use a total of 73 different programming languages. If you look at the numbers of projects in each language, it turns out that there are just four clear leaders. In first place, with 16788 projects is Java; in second place with 16762 projects is C++; in third place with 15966 projects is C; and in fourth place with 12221 project is PHP. All the others are way behind. For example, if you add up the numbers for Perl, Python and Ruby, the combined total is still less than the number of PHP projects.

Just over a month ago, I wrote about Java Swing becoming the world’s most popular GUI toolkit. It’s good to see that my favourite programming language - Java - is continuing to do so well in terms of popularity It’s not that Java is perfect by any means. There’s a lot that’s (still) wrong, and the pace of innovation in the Java platform over the last ten years has, at times, seemed painfully slow. But, even with its faults, I still prefer it over most languages for most tasks…

See the full, up-to-the-minute stats on Source Forge.
[via Simon Phipps]