Jim Kohli
3 August
Interesting news in the world of software :-)
SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG
The 2018 Top Programming Languages
Python extends its lead, and Assembly enters the Top Ten
https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-2018-top-programming-languages 9 Comments, 55 Like

Richard Sexton Subject: Pile of crap.
Summary: C, js, asm the only things worth using.
Followups-to: alt.flame,misc.test

First, Javascript is the most widely used computer language on earth. It can do more than python by far. I can't explain why python is so popular now, it's more of a fashion statement; it was never worth learning when it was new 30 years ago.
Second, 99% of the software you use on the net was written in C. Not that bizarre plus plus stuff that only insurance companies bought into, it's still garbage.
Third, the fact assembler is needed more now than ever is because how bad all the other languages besides C and JA are.
Fourth, IEEE are hardware guys. Never listen to EE's talk about software it's just awkward. 1
Pat Kohli The one thing the EEs should know about programming is that “Assembly” is not really a programming language but a family of programming languages where each computer architecture gets its own language. 1
Jeff Carroll The EEs know that. Spectrum is written by journalists. 1
Tom Fawcett The only thing surprising is that, here in 2018, assembly language is in the top ten. 3
Johnathan Vail Yeh really. I do embedded firmware and while assembler used to be important in the old days I haven't done any in years.
Jim Kohli hehehehe! based on how they derived scores, some of its popularity could be explained by asking questions and/or cussing out Assembly. "Popularity", as they measured it, doesn't index for feelings of positivism :-)
Richard Sexton There's always 2% of any big system that had to be performance optimized. I don't know about google but the inner loop of Alta Vista was a 7 instruction loop that it wasn't possible to squeeze another cycle out of.
I figure EE's listed it because
1) That's the one they know, "jmp ." is the first thing any ee has to know when bringing up a new board.
2) "All things being equal, if you have to choose between two programmers, choose the one that knows Assembly" - Andrea Frankel, 1988. Or 8. But def one of those two. Comp.arch.
Johnathan Vail Without reading the article, I assume this is a user poll of what they think might be important and not what they actually use on a daily basis?
Jim Kohli their method created an aggregated score from a number of different indices, including TIOBE-style rankings based on Google hits, various social media comments on the various languages, amount of code on GitHub, etc. it's not completely unassailable logic, but it's not completely contrived either.

Richard Sexton Jim Kohli Yeah it is.
Peter da Silva Scala's rise is 100% due to Apache Spark. 1
Jeff Carroll I have no joke here, I just like saying "Python sucks". 1
Jim Kohli and it squeezes, too
Mathew Murphy With luck we can eliminate Python in our lifetimes.
https://github.com/google/grumpy
GITHUB.COM
google/grumpy
Don Elliott What? No FORTRAN? No AUTOCODER?😎 1
Jim Kohli Yep. Nope. 1
Don Elliott Process control via FORTRAN. Now THERE'S a fun project!
Jim Kohli That's why we had JCL :-) 1
Don Elliott As in SYSIN DD*?
Jim Kohli that's the one
Ross Greinke Java is still quietly doing the hard stuff on the back end; JavaScript loudly doing the cool stuff on the front end. 1
Don Elliott Jim Kohli I was thinking more along the lines of real-time data acquisition and manipulation rather than card decks. Although I once punched a JCL card off by one space and listed my program 5 statements per page. 1
Jim Kohli When we first got started with the MR product, we were using Fort4, then Fortran5, Fortran77, Pascal, and Data General assembler, both for the microcomputer and the programmable "data control units" - it was pretty handy that the DCU's ran on a subset of the micro's instructions vs. a different instruction set. 1
Jim Kohli Neil Hattes' data acquisition board was commanded what to do via one 8-bit control register and, I think? 2 16-bit address registers. Such a long time ago. 1
Jim Kohli I think he was using 2 bits in the control register for status
Jim Kohli Good times :-)
Don Elliott Back in the 60s we physics guys used programs that removed all the accounting hooks because we needed the space. But we kept the clock running so we could report time elapsed. Then we restored to system from tape. IBM 7090s, CDC 1604s, etc.
Michael Anas Woot, woot - Fortran 77! It was fun loading your code from tape, especially when the vacuum turned on to thread the tape. Shooop!!! 1
Jeff Carroll Hah! Only elitists with actual budget got to load anything from magtape on my F77 host. All the rest of us had to use Hollerith cards! 1
Don Birzer Late nights with the 029... memories.
Jeff Carroll we had mostly 026s. A few 029s, but mostly 026s.
Larry Marik PASCAL was one of my favorites! 1
Jeff Carroll If you fire up your IRC client you can probably get Kludge to tell you the story of the COBOL-driven wind tunnel.
Jim Kohli ha!