
It’s that time of year when several infrequent programming language surveys burst on the scene and I’m now beginning to doubt the veracity of the IEEE survey, along with the eternally mad Tiobe which has C at #1. The IEEE has C at #3 in popularity, but also counts Arduino as a programming language because people search for Arduino code. Such lack of rigour does you no favour chaps, so much for engineers!
Arduino (that’s one in the picture) is, like a Raspberry Pi; a hardware platform. Given that Raspberry Pis have sold over 30 million which seems a lot more sold than Arduinos, why are they not listed?
RedMonk came out with their June survey recently (they do a small number each year) which is based on popularity of GitHub project’s programming languages. They put C at 11th and C++/C# as joint 5th. IEEE didn’t have C# in their top ten which is completely at odds with every other programming survey. Even Tiobe has it at #5.
As always, I value Reddit’s programming language sub-reddits which has C at 9th and C# at 4th with C++ at 5th based on the numbers of members of each group. There is always a lag between the numbers shown on the summary and the actual numbers in each sub-reddit when you click into it.