Java Magazine, Jan/Feb 2016
The Rise and Fall of Languages in 2015 An unusually good year for Java and JVM languages ORACLE COM JAVAMAGAZINE JANUARY FEBRUARY 2016 03 from the editor For the last few years in my first editorial of the new year Ive looked at how programming languages fared during the previous calendar year Despite the general perception that changes in language popularity are slow moving afairs programming languages often sufer sudden declines Objective C or enjoy unexpected surges Java as Ill explain in a moment The most widely used measure of popularity is the TIOBE Index which counts searches for languages and normalizes the results to a percentage of the total number of searches Whether web searches are an accurate proxy for popularity is a point of some contention however the TIOBE Index has one significant advantage it provides data for the index going back 15 years This makes it possible to identify multiyear trends easily Good analysis of language popularity necessarily relies on additional sources I also rely on PHOTOGRAPH BY BOB ADLER GETTY IMAGES data extracted from GitHub the popular host for open source and private projects Open Hub which surveys all active open source projects and Google Trends Each measure quantifies diferent things and its important to look at the data in context before determining what useful information it provides By most measures Java had a banner year TIOBE just named Java Language of the Year for 2015 because it enjoyed the greatest jump of any language in terms of percentage of searches TIOBE attributes this surge to the use of Java on Android I believe this is true but its only part of the story The rapid adoption of Java 8 certainly contributed too Javas surge definitively lays to rest the trend of click bait articles inquiring Is Java Dead in which pundits invariably concluded after lots of explanation that its not dead GitHub is a good way to measure popularity
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