Back in 2006, Clive Humby – a British mathematician and most famous of data scientists – said B that data is the new oil. But if it weren’t for code, that data would still be stuck in the metaphorical ground, which many might argue would be better for the world in both analogy and reality forms, but we digress… If data is the new oil, we’re not sure exactly what that makes code – perhaps the entire petrochemical infrastructure – but it shows how valuable good (and probably mediocre and awful) code has become.
With our ongoing exploration of classic coding languages that helped bring computing to the modern age (see page 62 for our focus on FOCAL this month), we thought we should take a whirlwind look at what the TIOBE index (http://tiobe.com/ tiobe-index) says are the top languages shaping the coding world today. And ask: is it a good metric? Well, that’s debatable; the TIOBE index is based on search engine results. This explains why Python appears at number one (while StackOverflow ranks it fourth) versus JavaScript being down in seventh place (StackOverflow ranks this first) and SQL coming in at number eight (StackOverflow ranks this second).
We could spend a whole article debating methodology, but really there shouldn’t be many surprises here – the classics are all represented and with the world being so internet-orientated, the code that lubricates that infernal machine heads up much of the rest of the table…
1 Python
The TIOBE index makes Python the most popular programming language in the
