Tag: JavaScript

Javascript grows in popularity

Posted on February 5, 2015 by - News

JavascriptAccording to numbers from RedMonk, a tech-industry analyst firm, while Apple’s development language Swift is growing it has a mountain to climb before it will rival the ever popular Javascript.

The tame Apple Press is doing its best to talk up the rise of Swift, but the real news from RedMonk’s list of the most-used languages survey is that Javascript is continuing to grow like topsy. Swift has risen from obscuring to one of the top 22 languages but given that is two spots below an OS called “groovy” we don’t think it is making that much of a splash.

The top ten are

  1. JavaScript
  2. Java
  3. PHP
  4. Python
  5. C#
  6. C++
  7. Ruby
  8. CSS
  9. C
  10. Objective-C

JavaScript edged Java for the top spot in the rankings, but as always, the difference between the two is so marginal as to be insignificant.

The Top 10 was effectively static. C++ and Ruby jumped each one spot to split fifth place with C#, but that minimal distinction reflects the lack of movement of the rest of the “Tier 1,” or top grouping of languages.

PHP has not shown the ability to unseat either Java or JavaScript, but it has remained unassailable for its part in the third position. After a brief drop in Q1 of 2014, Python has been stable in the fourth spot, and the rest of the Top 10 looks much as it has for several quarters.

In fact rather than Swift, Red Monk predicts that Go is doing the best.  Six months ago it was predicted that it would become a Top 20 language within six to twelve months. Six months following that, Go can consider that mission accomplished. Go jumped over Visual Basic, Clojure and Groovyand displaces Coffeescript entirely – to take number 17 on the list.

Red Monk said that Julia and Rust are the two notable languages to watch, Julia and Rust’s growth has typically been in lockstep, though not for any particular functional reason. This time Rust outpaced Julia, jumping eight spots to 50 against Julia’s more steady progression from 57 to 56.

 

NSA makes many become one

Posted on August 11, 2014 by - News

shoe phoneBoffins at Carnegie Mellon University, sponsored by the US’s number one spying outfit, has come up with a programming Esperanto which unites all different programming languages under a single umbrella.

Any excitement about the development is that since it is funded by the NSA it will be full of backdoors which can harvest personal details on behalf of the US government, but you can still admire the technology.

Dubbed Wyvern which was a mythical dragon-like thing that only has two legs instead of four it helps programmers design apps and websites without having to rely on a whole bunch of different stylesheets and different amalgamations spread across different files.

Jonathan Aldrich, the researcher developing the language, wrote in his blog that Web applications are written as a poorly-coordinated mishmash of artifacts written in different languages, file formats, and technologies. For example, a web application may consist of JavaScript code on the client, HTML for structure, CSS for presentation, XML for AJAX-style communication, and a mixture of Java, plain text configuration files, and database software on the server.

“This diversity increases the cost of developers learning these technologies. It also means that ensuring system-wide safety and security properties in this setting is difficult, he said.

This creates security problems, which was why the NSA was interested. After all it has protect its own systems from hackers.

Wyvern can automatically tell what language a person is programming in, based solely on the type of data that’s being manipulated. That means that if the language detects you are editing a database, for instance, it’ll automatically assume you’re using SQL. The language is still a prototype and is all open saucy