FORTRAN and COBOL Re-enter TIOBE's Ranking of Programming Language Popularity (i-programmer.info) 18
"The TIOBE Index sets out to reflect the relative popularity of computer languages," writes i-Programmer, "so it comes as something of a surprise to see two languages dating from the 1950's in this month's Top 20.
Having broken into the the Top 20 in April 2021 Fortran has continued to rise and has now risen to it's highest ever position at #10... The headline for this month's report by Paul Jansen on the TIOBE index is:
Fortran in the top 10, what is going on?
Jansen's explanation points to the fact that there are more than 1,000 hits on Amazon for "Fortran Programming" while languages such as Kotlin and Rust, barely hit 300 books for the same search query. He also explains that Fortran is still evolving with the new ISO Fortran 2023 definition published less than half a year ago....
The other legacy language that is on the rise in the TIOBE index is COBOL. We noticed it re-enter the Top 20 in January 2024 and, having dropped out in the interim, it is there again this month.
More details from TechRepublic: Along with Fortran holding on to its spot in the rankings, there were a few small changes in the top 10. Go gained 0.61 percentage points year over year, rising from tenth place in May 2023 to eighth this year. C++ rose slightly in popularity year over year, from fourth place to third, while Java (-3.53%) and Visual Basic (-1.8) fell.
Here's how TIOBE ranked the 10 most popular programming languages in May:
Fortran in the top 10, what is going on?
Jansen's explanation points to the fact that there are more than 1,000 hits on Amazon for "Fortran Programming" while languages such as Kotlin and Rust, barely hit 300 books for the same search query. He also explains that Fortran is still evolving with the new ISO Fortran 2023 definition published less than half a year ago....
The other legacy language that is on the rise in the TIOBE index is COBOL. We noticed it re-enter the Top 20 in January 2024 and, having dropped out in the interim, it is there again this month.
More details from TechRepublic: Along with Fortran holding on to its spot in the rankings, there were a few small changes in the top 10. Go gained 0.61 percentage points year over year, rising from tenth place in May 2023 to eighth this year. C++ rose slightly in popularity year over year, from fourth place to third, while Java (-3.53%) and Visual Basic (-1.8) fell.
Here's how TIOBE ranked the 10 most popular programming languages in May:
- Python
- C
- C++
- Java
- C#
- JavaScript
- Visual Basic
- Go
- SQL
- Fortran
On the rival PYPL ranking of programming language popularity, Fortran does not appear anywhere in the top 29.
A note on its page explains that "Worldwide, Python is the most popular language, Rust grew the most in the last 5 years (2.1%) and Java lost the most (-4.0%)." Here's how it ranks the 10 most popular programming languages for May:
- Python (28.98% share)
- Java (15.97% share)
- JavaScript (8.79%)
- C# (6.78% share)
- R (4.76% share)
- PHP (4.55% share)
- TypeScript (3.03% share)
- Swift (2.76% share)
- Rust (2.6% share)
Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm old enough to have written Cobol when it was still COBOL and ran on mainframes. Why on earth would I want to go back to doing all that typing? Compared to today's languages, there are no redeeming qualities of Cobol, other than that if you've got an antique piece of software written in it, you can keep maintaining it. Some people might enjoy it, but for me, no thanks.
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"Until we can replace them" is useless. And I always find it hilarious when companies end up doing this because they are spending way more in the long run than if they just spent the money to update the damn system a long ass time ago when upgrading wouldn't have been so difficult. Every delay into upgrading off these systems increases the difficulty and cost of the upgrade, while also increasing its current maintenance costs.
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Change for the sake of change is usually pointless for the customer. If I'm a customer, and what I'm paying you for works well for me, why should I reinvent my business process to satisfy you if you can't convince me I will have a real, relevant benefit?
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The financial world runs on "antique" software. Banks don't like to lose money so they keep using decades old code for a reason, it works. It's well understood and vetted. Sure move it all to python, what could possibly go wrong?
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Banks migrated to PowerBuilder for the Y2K preparations 25+ years ago. They aren't actually running even older code on any kind of mainframe for modern business functions
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For all of its faults, it got the job done and produced software that outliv
Of course there's another possibility (Score:5, Insightful)
And that is that TIOBE and its brethren don't actually measure or tell us anything particularly useful. But I don't expect Jansen to give voice to that.
As they (at least FORTRAN) should (Score:5, Informative)
There's nothing better than FORTRAN for computations involving large matrices, the libraries it has are excellent and well-tested, and the newer versions provide you with any facility you find in a "modern" language. And it is FAST, so fast that your numpies cry out of envy.
COBOL, well, I don't like it, but I may be biased.
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FORTRAN really works well and lots of new code it still written in it. It really *is* the language of technical computing and very good at it.
COBOL, on the other hand, exists solely due to maintaining legacy code, nearly no one is starting new projects or writing new code in COBOL.
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All I've ever heard done in COBOL was "legacy code maintenance" and that was in the early 90s. The bastard is a tough little motherfucker, I'll die before it is fully dead :)
COBOL is nearly immortal (Score:3)
When I was in school 30 years ago, they offered a non-credit course in COBOL so we could find work between semesters. Non-credit because it was already 'dead'. I am not surprised to find you can still find a need for COBOL programming skills.
Metrics could use some improvement (Score:2)
Do you trust a website using wordpress? :)
On a serious note, I find it odd that JavaScript is not ranked higher, considering its extensive use in front-end web development. This might be due to different keywords and frameworks not being aggregated under the umbrella of JS. For instance, typescript gets transpiled to javascript and checkout the top change requests & bugs mentioned:
"Apart from “ programming”, also other queries such as “programming with ”, “ development
Fortran is a language of the 2020s (Score:3)
It isn't any more accurate to call Fortran a "language of the 50s" than it is to call C a "language of the 70s". As others have noted, Fortran has evolved significantly over the years, with the most recent revision, Fortran 2023, published just six months ago. It is still a very popular language in engineering and scientific applications.
Programming on cards is back in style (Score:2)
How else to explain both Fortran and Python on the same list. Pretty sure cobol also had an 80 column limit at some point.
Next python feature: all-caps only and no mathematical operators beyond the basic four. Comparisons to be expressed with .gt. and string comparison with .eq.
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Fortran has had a free-form dialect since before you were born, dear.