| Dynamic Programming Languages are Gaining Ground Over Static Languages |
| Written by Peter Vescuso, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Black Duck Software |
| Tuesday, 25 August 2009 11:07 |
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Black Duck recently completed an analysis of programming languages used in open source projects. While the universe of open source projects is much larger than those projects frequently used for mobile applications, the trends seem to reflect those of the mobile industry and the LiMo Platform in particular. The analysis, which looked at language usage by counting lines of source code across all open source projects, shows static programming languages losing share to dynamic languages. C and C++ taken together, account for the majority (>50%) of code in open source projects. While Black Duck did not run the analysis on the LiMo platform, our understanding is that C is its most common language as well. Trends in open source code are more interesting. When analyzing project releases from the past 12-months, static programming languages C, C++ and Java are being used less often (-1.8 percentage points of share) in open source projects than dynamic languages JavaScript and PHP (+2.4 percentage points). Also gaining ground are SQL (up over 1 percentage point) and Ruby (+0.2 percentage point). Data points drawn from the analysis include:
· 36% of projects with a release in the last 12 months included JavaScript, the most-used and fastest-growing scripting language. More projects overall have used JavaScript than Java by a margin of 3 percentage points. · 65% of open source code is C, C++, and Java. · 80% of open source code is C, C++, Java, Shell and JavaScript. JavaScript is the only one of these languages gaining in share – up over 2 percentage points in terms of number of lines of code. · C is the only language that has broken the billion lines-of-code barrier. Al Hilwa, Program Director for Application Development Software at IDC reviewed the data and made the following observations: "Black Duck's data is consistent with what IDC is finding on the shift of application development towards web architectures. Languages associated with web applications such as JavaScript and PHP are showing greater growth when compared with traditional languages used for business logic of applications such as Java, C and C++.” The shift to web architectures is reflected by Mal Minhas, CTO of LiMo Foundation in his recent post where he recommends leveraging web service APIs as much as possible. In addition, the LiMo R2 specification announcement included support for the BONDI specification and framework which standardizes interfaces for web applications. |
