Star letters

It was only my dear wife’s prompt action with the Heimlich manoeuvre that saved me at breakfast recently after I opened the March 2023 issue of PC Pro and read the Top Ten Programming Languages article ( see issue 341, p42). Was this 2008 calling?

The list had Visual Basic at the number 6 and JavaScript at the number 7 positions, and those two just strain the list’s credibility. Software analyst TIOBE’s methodology seems at odds with surveys from the likes of Red Monk, GitHub Octoverse, Reddit Language Subreddits and StackOverflow; all of those have JavaScript in first place and put C at around tenth place.

Based on these four, a reasonable top ten list of programming languages might be closer to this (in order from one to ten): JavaScript, Python, Java, C++, C#, TypeScript, PHP, Rust, Go, C. No Visual Basic or Assembly Language! David Bolton

The TIOBE index covers many different applications of software, which can make it unhelpful. In 1999 I had experience in C and C++, but I wanted a language for long-term solo hobby projects involving desktop graphics. I couldn’t predict which OSes would dominate the future, and in addition, having to track changing GUIs on every OS was out of the question.

I therefore chose Java, as it had the AWT (Abstract Windowing Toolkit – integer based) and Swing with its 2D API supporting floating

point. It also supported garbage collection, multithreading and atomic operations. C++ had none of those. Now in 2023 the C++ language still doesn’t have standard graphics support or garbage collection. I’m very glad I chose Java. Chris Gay

Associate editor Darien Graham-Smith replies: Thanks both for writing in! TIOBE’s rankings do favour long-established languages over newer ones. That’s not necessarily a bad thing if you’re looking to learn something new, as these tend to be the languages with the biggest communities and the widest availability of resources. If you’re seeking a language with specific characteristics, or which is widely used in a particular industry, hopefully our feature helped narrow down the field.