In this month’s column, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of by looking back at how programming languages evolved over the last 10 years, and look ahead to what is in store for us over the next decade.

LFY/OSFY

Welcome to a special edition of CodeSport. As you know, this month, we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of LcY/ OScY. This edition carries a number of articles featuring the ‘Top 10 …’ in various domains, in celebration of our 10th anniversary. Celebrating 10 years is a grand milestone for LcY/OScY. As we have journeyed through the last 10 years, the world of programming languages has witnessed many a change. In this month’s column, we take a nostalgic look at how programming languages evolved over the past decade, and provide a peek into what the next 10 years may hold for us. themselves as ‘Data Scientists’ instead of as ‘geeky programmers’. Programmers learnt to develop skills in statistics, machine learning and data mining, as well as in traditional coding and testing techniques.

Given these developments in the software ecosystem, the popularity of different programming languages has fluctuated widely over the past 10 years. The well-known TIOBE programming community index (http://www.tiobe.com) measures the popularity of programming languages. It is enlightening to look at what languages were popular in 2003 and compare them with the TIOBE index in 2013. Look at Tables 1 and 2. Can you guess which table reflects the popular languages of 2012 and which shows 2003’s Top 10?

It is pretty obvious that Table 2 deals with 2013; the dead giveaway is the presence of Objective-C as third most popular, propelled by the mobile app development focus on iOS. Table 1 gives the popular programming languages of 2003. It is interesting to compare the two tables that are 10 years apart. C, CHH and Java continue to rule the roost. Performance-intensive system software code still gets written in C or CHH. The majority of application development is still in Java. Mobile application development on iOS and Android accounts for the popularity of Objective-C and Java. C# popularity can be attributed to Web/ mobile application development on the Windows platform. Python’s popularity and adoption has increased considerably over the last 10 years. If you are wondering where Ruby is in Table 2, Ruby was the 11th most popular programming language as of January 2013, and hence did not make it to Table 2. More detailed comparisons of