[nylug-talk] Popularity of Programming Languages

[Peter C. Norton]

On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 10:24:54AM -0400, mbac at netgraft.com wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 11 May 2006 9:37 am, Michael Bacarella wrote:
> >On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 01:33:57AM -0400, Monjay Settro wrote:
> >> How are you gauging the use of popular programming languages? Does 
> >>your method and observations coincide with Tiobe's?
> >>
> >> http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
> >
> >I'm kind of stunned that decades later, C is still very relevant.
> 
> Let me expand now that I've got some time on the subway to kill.
> 
> Is C's strong presence simply the weight of the huge body of existing 
> code plus maintenance traffic?  Is anyone developing new applications 
> today exclusively in C?  If so, why?
> 
> I still write C code, but it is always small pieces, in situations where 
> we tried to do it in Java or Python and found that we were CPU 
> bottlenecked.  Interestingly enough, because of how exceptional these 
> cases are, the usual anti-C rhetoric is irrelevant. ;)

On the yum mailing list yesterday or so someone sent in some code he'd
written to run through the yum (sqllite, really) indexes faster. The
performance in C was about 3-4x faster (from memory, that's why I'm
fudging the numbers in a big way). Now, this is only a difference of 2
(C) sec to 6-8 (python) seconds on all of fedora core, but that's part
of the benefit. C is still pretty close to assempler, so its faster. I
think the biggest win is that unlike most compiled languages you don't
have the load time of initializing the interpreter/runtime.

-Peter

-- 
The 5 year plan:
In five years we'll make up another plan.
Or just re-use this one.