Programming

These 5 methods will help you earn more salary as a software developer

In today’s competitive age, technology jobs are profitable, as businesses are willing to pay a premium to those having technical skills. Programming or software developing is one of the most lucrative fields in today’s time, and all software developers want to earn more salary based on the work they do.

However, Raviteja Chirala, a data scientist, and an avid programmer shared a different view on this topic on Quora. According to him, those people who earn higher salaries look to better themselves, and money follows them.

Below are the 5 methods that Raviteja believes one needs to follow to earn more salary as a software developer:

Build credibility: One of the most important things that you should do is to build credibility, as this will help people believe in you and trust you. You can do this by contributing to open-source projects, freelancing, hackathons etc.

Earn attention: Your work should speak for you. Try to make yourself known in the small software world with your work. Many companies look for engineers and architects those who have contributed to the field of software. They are the most sought after by companies and if you get selected, you are there to stay.

Keep yourself updated: It is very important to keep yourself updated in the ever-changing field of technology, as any proven technology that you work with may be out of date in a few years. You have to be on top of new technologies that come into the market. As it grows older, there will be more people involved in it. So, the bracket is really large at this point.

Present yourself: If you are doing some cool stuff at your work, don’t let it cool down. Go out for meetups and showcase your work, as this will help in growing your boundaries.

Switch companies/teams: Your work becomes stagnant at some point after a couple of years. Switching to new teams and doing different things for companies working on different technologies will reward you better.

Do let us know your opinion on the above methods or do you have something more to add, please let us know in the comments section below.

Source: Forbes

IBM Files For “Blockchain For Program Code Credit and Programmer Contribution” Patent

IBM, the tech giant, has filed a new patent application that would track developers’ codes and milestones on a blockchain-type network. In other words, IBM is looking to record the performances or accomplishments of coders by using a distributed network when they work together on the same project.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published the application called as the “Blockchain For Program Code Credit and Programmer Contribution in a Collective” on July 5. It forsees using the technology to create “a secure and robust approach to track and to append information related to collaborative coding for the purpose of credit, reward, and dispute resolution, and for other purposes.”

As the application suggests, such tracking can be used to properly credit different designers according to what they actually did. According to IBM, programmers basically need to work together to create a software product, but an effective approach measuring a programmer’s contribution is lacking.

As IBM goes on to explain:

“Code transactions and parameters associated with a stakeholder are compiled into a chain of programmer transaction blockchain blocks. The chain can be considered a chronicle of a piece of software, …and the code “status” path through its recent history or complete history can be tracked, along with its various programmers, though the lifetime and versions of the code, various history parameters, etc.”

“Once the new block has been calculated, it can be appended to the stakeholder’s application software history blockchain, as described above. The block may be updated in response to many triggers, such as, when a programmer selects a button on a graphical user interface (GUI) on a computer display showing a code editor to add code, when a unit test has been completed, when a code integration is completed, when an assigned work item is closed, and so forth,” the company goes on to note.

This is not the first time that IBM has filed patents for blockchain technology. In April, the tech giant was looking to seek patent a method to ensure that a network of connected devices could securely execute blockchain-based smart contracts.

Source: coindesk

Not happy with Github being acquired by Microsoft? Here are the best 5 GitHub alternatives

GitHub, the largest source-code repository in the world, has been in news lately. Thanks to Microsoft who recently announced that it would purchase the hosted Git (version control system) service GitHub Inc. for $7.5 billion in an all-stock deal.

For those who are not aware, GitHub is a popular web-based hosting service for source code and development projects that allows developers to use the tools of the privately-held company to store code, change, adapt and improve software from its public repositories for free. GitHub users have a choice of using either Git or Subversion as their VCS (Version Control System), to manage, maintain and deploy software projects. It has more than 28 million developers already collaborating on the platform and are working on more than 85 million repositories of code.

While Microsoft has assured that GitHub will continue to operate independently and will remain an open platform after the acquisition, open source developers are not hopeful and may look for an alternate place.

In this article, we provide you top 5 GitHub alternatives to host your open-source project:

1. GitLab

GitLab is a free and open source project licensed under MIT that is very close to GitHub in use and feel. However, GitLab sacrifices the ease of use of GitHub for more privacy, security and serving speed. One if its unique features are that you can install GitLab onto your own server.

GitLab’s UI is clean and intuitive and also claims to handle large files and repositories better than GitHub. It supports issue tracker, group milestones, moving of issues between projects, configurable issue boards and group issues, and more. It also supports powerful branching tools and protected branches and tags, time tracking, custom notifications, issues weights, merge requests, file locking, project roadmaps, confidential and related issues, burn down charts for project and group milestones.

GitLab also allows users to have unlimited public AND private repos for free. It is being used by Stack Overflow, IBM, AT&T, Microsoft, and more. GitLab consists of three versions: Community Edition, Enterprise Edition Starter, and Enterprise Edition Premium, where each version can have different features. It is recommended to understand your needs first before selecting a certain edition.

2. Bitbucket

Owned by Atlassian, Bitbucket is second only to GitHub in terms of popularity and usage. It is a web-based version control repository hosting service for source code and development projects. However, it also supports the Mercurial VCS as well as Git, whereas GitHub only supports Git and Subversion. It is available on Windows and Mac for free.

Bitbucket offers free accounts with an unlimited number of private repositories for individuals and organizations (which can have up to five users or lesser but can be increased by selecting a paid plan). Bitbucket allows you to push files using any Git client, or the Git command line. Bitbucket can also be controlled through its web interface. It also offers amazing support for Git Large File Storage (LFS) for game development.

BitBucket integrates and communicates well with JIRA, Bamboo, and HipChat, who are a part of the Atlassian software family. It also offers features such as code reviews, Bitbucket pipelines, code search, pull requests, flexible deployment models, diff view, smart mirroring, issue tracking, IP whitelisting, an unlimited private repos, commit history and branch permissions for safeguarding your workflow. Depending on your security needs, Bitbucket deploys in the cloud, on a local server, or your company’s data center.

3. LaunchPad

Launchpad is a free, popular platform for building, managing and collaborating on software projects from Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu Linux. It offers features such as code hosting, Ubuntu package building and hosting bug tracking, code reviews, mail listing, and specification tracking. It also supports translations, answers tracking and FAQs. Launchpad has good support for Git that allows you to host or import Git repositories on Launchpad for free.

Some of the popular projects hosted on Launchpad include Ubuntu Linux, MySQL, OpenStack, Terminator and more.

4. SourceForge

SourceForge is a web-based service that offers software developers a centralized online location to control and manage free and open-source software projects. It was the first to offer this service for free to open-source projects.

SourceForge provides a source code repository, bug tracking, mirroring of downloads for load balancing, a wiki for documentation, developer and user mailing lists, user-support forums, user-written reviews and ratings, a news bulletin, micro-blog for publishing project updates, and other features. SourceForge hosts lots of open-source Linux, Windows, Mac, Apache OpenOffice, FileZilla projects, and lots more.

SourceForge servers support for PHP, Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby, and shell scripts. You can upload to Sourceforge through an SFTP client. It offers you the option of using Git, Subversion (SVN) and Mercurial (Hg) as your project’s VCS on SourceForge.

5. GitBucket

GitBucket is an open source, highly pluggable Git platform that runs on JVM (Java Virtual Machine). It comes with features such as Public / Private Git repositories (with http/https and ssh access), GitLFS support, a repository viewer, issues, pull requests and wiki for repositories, activity timeline and email notifications, account and group management with LDAP integration, and a plug-in system to extend its core features.

If you’re seriously into developing apps, staying on top of security issues relating to apps is important. Taking sensible precautions to avoid having to redevelop your app to patch a security hole or receiving game-ending negative publicity over a breach of your data stores is critical when you plan to develop a suite of successful mobile apps.

Here are a few suggestions for taking sensible steps to protect your business.

Use Enterprise-grade SDK’s & API’s

There are so many SDK’s and API’s these days that it’s hard to isolate the good from the bad. Whether you’re looking for a Java scanner API or you’re including push notifications for all app users, using quality code is important. Enterprise-grade packages have been battle tested over time because of the expectations that major corporations will use the SDK or API. They expect quality, not poor excuses, and the result is better code for all.

Having to spend time fixing the app when a bad SDK has a new bug that wasn’t known before eats into available development time that could go toward developing new features. It’s in everyone’s best interest to use the best integration code possible.

Testing, Testing, Testing

Testing all the features of the app is necessary to ensure it works as planned. It’s not enough to rely on incremental updates to patch holes in the testing process. Testing new features and making sure that they haven’t put a wrecking ball through existing features that previously worked perfectly avoids having egg on the face. A SAAS like BrowserStack is an excellent way to test an app across over 1,000 different mobile devices to see how it will roughly look and perform.

With proper software testing for obvious bugs, the team avoids bad reviews appearing in the relevant app store. Avoiding negative reviews protects against a loss of confidence in the app, a reduction in new app downloads, and fewer active users who find the frequent crashing or failed feature to be too much to deal with. Once they switch out to an alternative app, they probably don’t return.

Security Testing

Along with regular app testing, security testing in this day and age is vital. Along with testing, keeping apprised of the latest security news that impacts SDK’s, API’s, and other aspects of app development avoids you being caught out. Of course, TechWorm is the best place to do this.

Also, look out for apps and sites being shut down or taken over (like with Flickr). Consider how this might affect any existing integration of their API or whether the company taking them over is an international one with possible security implications to consider.

The more complex your app becomes, or the greater number of apps released by the same publisher, the more the challenges increase. When using quality API’s and SDK’s along with following best practices for feature testing and security testing, you’re likely to avoid unnecessary problems cropping up. Not doing so likely takes developers away from improving the app or adding new, requested features. Pretty soon, developers get bogged down fixing past issues borne out of bad procedures and progress stalls as a result. Put the best foot forward and if there are past issues to clear up, do so before they come back to haunt your development team.

LaunchCode offers free coding classes to help you launch your career in technology

LaunchCode is a non-profit organization based in St. Louis, Missouri, that works with hundreds of companies to set up paid apprenticeships in technology for talented people who lack the traditional qualifications to get a good job. The non-profit startup has trained more than 1,000 people with essential computer skills for free that has helped them in getting a job in the tech industry.

Now, LaunchCode has figured out a distinct method way to teach people with all backgrounds how to code before assisting them in finding an apprenticeship.

Those interested need to apply online for a LaunchCode apprenticeship. The startup offers a 20-week introduction to computer programming course, wherein the apprentice is taught computer coding skills. During the course of the program, mentors help apprentices’ grow their skills while providing feedback on their progress and help them to finish the program. Then, LaunchCode will match the apprentice with one of their 500 employer partners for a paid apprenticeship. The non-profit says more than four out of five apprentices become full-time hires.

Tampa Bay has been listed as one of LaunchCode’s six locations across the country. The first class in Tampa had started in 2017, and on Thursday night, it hosted its first graduation ceremony at Nielsen Media Research’s headquarters in Oldsmar.

Kyla Rieger, a Tampa Bay resident, who was a stay at home mom for nine years, decided to re-enter the workforce but did not know where to begin.

“I tried to learn to code on my own, but it’s hard to know where to start,” she said.

That’s when she saw an ad on Facebook for LaunchCode Tampa Bay. 

LaunchCode is expected to come up with their second round of applications shortly. For more information, click here.

Android developer language Kotlin has risen in popularity, shows Stack Overflow’s annual survey

Stack Overflow published their eight Annual Developer Survey results this year, which saw over 100,000 developers take the 30-minute survey. Stack Overflow, a popular developer community and jobs site, revealed the most-popular, top-earning, and preferred programming languages in their 2018 developer survey.

Kotlin and Mozilla-developed Rust emerged as the most-loved programming languages, according to Stack Overflow’s 2018 developer survey. For the first time, the coders were asked about the Java-friendly Kotlin by Stack Overflow. The reason probably could be because of the full support that Google gave it in the Android Studio integrated development environment last year.

This week, Kotlin was rated as the second-fastest growing language after Apple’s Swift for iOS and macOS app development, by RedMonk, a developer analyst firm.

Other preferred languages include Python, Microsoft’s TypeScript, Google’s Go, Swift, JavaScript, C#, F#, and Clojure.

While Visual Basic 6, Cobol, CoffeeScript, VB.NET, and VBA are among the most-despised languages, JavaScript continues to remain at the top spot as the most-popular programming, scripting, and markup language. It is followed by HTML, CSS, SQL, Java, Bash/Shell, Python, C#, and PHP.

According to Stack Overflow, Python is one of the fastest-growing languages in the ranks of programming languages on our survey, surpassing C# in popularity this year, much like it surpassed PHP last year.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is the overall most-popular development environment, while the most-loved platform is Linux. Google’s TensorFlow is also a popular tool.

In the survey, the developers were asked about their outlook to the future of artificial intelligence (AI). While 73 percent of respondents are more excited about its opportunities than worried by its dangers, only a quarter of them agree with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s view that government should regulate AI. The cutting edge AI “scares the hell out of me” said Musk this week.

Developers working with Erlan, Scala, Ocaml, Clojure, Go, Groovy, and Objective-C in the U.S. get the highest paid salaries ranging between $110,000 to $115,000. On the other hand, developers working with F# have the highest salaries around the world.

While the median salary of developers globally is $55,000, but the median salary of developers in the U.S. is almost double at $100,000. Other countries with median salaries above $90,000 include Switzerland and Israel, while programmers in the UK and Germany earn on average just over $60,000.

The last year’s survey done by Stack Overflow attracted criticism for the way the women and other minorities who used their site were treated. To avoid any controversy this year, the report has not included the ‘Female Developer Age’ or questions such as identify as ninjas, rockstars, or gurus or whether developers prefer Star Wars or Star Trek.

While more than 90 percent respondents of the 2018 survey are men, Stack Overflow says that nine percent of U.S. survey respondents this year are women. However, just 6.8 percent of respondents around the world are women, which saw a one percent drop since last year’s survey.

“We had survey participation at almost the rate we would expect from our traffic. In regions including the US, India, and the UK, women are represented at higher levels among students than among professional developers,” Stack Overflow says.

The survey also looked at the varied representation of women and men in different developer roles.

Stack Overflow finds that women have the highest representation as academics, QA developers, data scientists, and designers. System admins and DevOps specialists are 25 to 30 times more likely to be men than women, while developers who are educators or academic researchers are about 10 times more likely to be men than women.

Source: ZDNet, stackoverflow

Apple’s Swift makes it into top 10 programming languages

In a quarterly ranking of programming languages conducted by analysis firm, RedMonk this week reveals that JavaScript continues to dominate the language rankings like last year. Although the results were published this week (in March), the RedMonk report contains data compiled for January 2018.

RedMonk’s rankings are based on pull requests in GitHub, as well as an estimated count of how many times a language is tagged on developer knowledge-sharing site, Stack Overflow. They extract language rankings from GitHub and Stack Overflow, and combine them for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction.

“The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends,” RedMonk said.

According to the data, Java, Python, PHP, and C# too continued to remain at the second, third, fourth and fifth places respectively this year.

“As always, the consistent performance of our Tier 1 languages — the top 10, more or less — is at once surprising and unsurprising,” RedMonk said. “The relatively static nature of the top 10 languages is interesting, certainly, in a technology landscape that is best characterized not by the high level of change but the increasing pace of same.

“Conversely, however, it’s important to note that the numbers measured are accretive, and as with financial metrics rates of growth are fastest when projects are new and harder and harder to come by over time. New language entrants are behind from the day they are released, in other words, which makes displacing the most popular languages a significant and uphill battle.”

However, the surprise element in the language ranking was Apple’s Swift, which moved to the tenth place in the rankings joining its predecessor, Objective C.

“Finally, the apprentice is now the master,” RedMonk who has been compiling quarterly rankings since 2011 said in regards to Swift. “Technically, this isn’t entirely accurate, as Swift merely tied the language it effectively replaced – Objective C – rather than passing it. Still, it’s difficult to view this run as anything but a changing of the guard.”

RedMonk said that Swift, Apple’s language which is primarily intended for Apple operating systems (iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS) has been growing at an “incredible rate”. It has managed to climb up 44 places in RedMonk’s language rankings in the latter half of 2017. It has also managed to reach the top 10 rankings in under four years at a record pace.

“Apple’s support for Objective C and the consequent opportunities it created via the iOS platform have kept the language in a high profile role almost as long as we’ve been doing these rankings. Even as Swift grew at an incredible rate, Objective C’s history kept it out in front of its replacement. Eventually, however, the trajectories had to intersect, and this quarter’s run is the first occasion in which this has happened.

“In a world in which it’s incredibly difficult to break into the Top 25 of language rankings, let alone the Top 10, Swift managed the chore in less than four years. It remains a growth phenomenon, even if its ability to penetrate the server side has not met expectations.”

Check out the top 20 programming languages below:

1. JavaScript
2. Java
3. Python
4. PHP
5. C#
6. C++
7. CSS
8. Ruby
9. C
10. Swift
11. Objective-C
12. Shell
13. R
14. TypeScript
15. Scala
16. Go
17. PowerShell
18. Perl
19. Haskell
20. Lua

Source: Wired, Redmonk

Popular programming language Kotlin arrives as a snap for Ubuntu

Canonical has announced that the modern programming language, Kotlin, is now available as a snap package for Ubuntu. Over the past couple of months, Canonical has also announced snap packages for the popular music streaming service Spotify, and apps such as Slack and Skype.

Developed by JetBrains, Kotlin is a universal development language that runs on the top of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and works across all major tools and services such as GitHub, Slack, Android Studio, Spring, Vert.x and even Minecraft to name a few.

“In choosing Snapcraft, JetBrains continues to show confidence in a platform that enables Kotlin and Java developers to bring their software to tens of millions of Linux users. Kotlin is proving extremely popular and adding it to the wealth of developer-focused snaps already available providers an incredibly powerful platform to produce and distribute software,” said Jamie Bennett, VP of Engineering, Devices and IoT at Canonical.

Since Snaps are containerised software packages, it allows users to keep the complete package up to date with almost zero effort.

“We believe the main advantage of using Snapcraft to install Kotlin for the development community is that developers don’t have to care about all the required dependencies (like JDK) as well as about future updates”, says Aleksey Rostovskiy, Engineer at JetBrains. “With snap packages, developers can seamlessly install Kotlin and all the required dependencies just once and from then on the update process happens in the background, so they always stay on the latest version available”.

Most popular programming languages in 2018

The Kotlin snap will work natively on all Linux distributions that support snaps, including Linux Mint, Manjaro, Debian, Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Solus and Ubuntu. Besides offering greater flexibility for developers, Snaps also allow them to push automatic updates to their software, roll-back features, and offer security benefits to users.

To install Kotlin as a snap click here or you can run snap install kotlin –classic on any system with snap support enabled.

Source: Ubuntu Insights, Neowin

Java Tops TIOBE’s and PYPL’s Programming Language Popularity Index

TIOBE (The Importance of Being Earnest), one of the most popular rating index for programming languages, has released its latest index for February 2018. According to their rankings, Java continues to remain the most popular programming language followed by C and C++.

Other popular languages include Python, C#, and Visual Basic. In contradiction to TIOBE’s previous prediction that Visual Basic would vanish in a few years, it is performing well as compared to other languages.

TIOBE has added SQL to the index, as the language is now Turing-complete, it said.

On the other hand, PYPL (PopularitY of Programming Language), which looks at the popularity of language tutorials on Google, shows Java as the most preferred programming language followed by Python and PHP.

For those unaware, TIOBE calculates the rankings based on the number of search engine queries, which contain the name of the programming language as a keyword. Alternatively, PYPL uses the raw data from Google Trends to calculate the rankings, which is based on the more number of searches for a particular language tutorial, the more popular it is assumed to be.

While Python continued to maintain its popularity, other scripting languages such as Perl, PHP, and Ruby have seen a decrease in their popularity. The reason behind this is the difficulty in writing a critical and large software system, which meets high-quality demands.

“Even a scripting language such as JavaScript that is inevitable while doing web programming was forced to evolve to a safer language,” stated the report.

Based on research data as of February 2018, here is the list of the top 10 programming languages in 2018, according to the TIOBE Index and PYPL rankings.

List of the most popular programming language in 2018

1. Java

Java is one of the most popular, most adopted and general-purpose programming language used by millions of developers and billions of devices around the world. It is a class-based, object-oriented language and designed to be portable, which means that you can find it on all platforms, operating systems, and devices. It is used to develop all kinds of Android apps, desktop apps, and video games. It is also commonly used as a server-side language for enterprise-level backend development. This programming language has long-term compatibility and developers are comfortable with Java.

2. C

C is the predecessor of C++ and is a simplified and less functional version. C is a compiled, procedural language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie for use in the UNIX operating system. Although originally designed as a systems programming language, C has proved to be a powerful and flexible language that can be used for a variety of applications, from business programs to engineering.

3. C++

C++ is a general-purpose programming language based on C language. It has imperative, object-oriented and generic programming features. C++ is a powerful, high-performance language used to build system software, games engines and desktop and web apps.

4. Python

Python is a widely used high-level programming language used for general-purpose programming, as it is simple and readable. Python is the easiest coding language to learn for the first time learners. In order to become a seasoned professional, every beginner should at least know this language.

5. PHP

PHP (Hypertext Pre-Processor) is a server-side programming language, which can be used to create web pages written in HTML. It is used on more than 80 percent of websites today including Facebook, Wikipedia, Tumblr, and WordPress. PHP is not only a popular language among new programmers due to its easy-to-use techniques; it also does offer tons of advanced features for more experienced programmers.

6. JavaScript

JavaScript is a popular, powerful, dynamic, scripting language that is used to create cool websites and games for the web. It derives much of its syntax from The C Language. JavaScript is compatible across all browsers, and is used in over 90 percent of all web pages. In recent years, JavaScript has also gained use as the foundation of Node.js, a server technology that among other things enables real-time communication.

7. C# (C Sharp)

C# is a simple, modern, general-purpose, type-safe, object-oriented programming language. It is intended for use in developing software components suitable for deployment in distributed environments.

8. Objective-C

Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language used by the Apple operating system. It powers Apple’s OS X and iOS, as well as its APIs, and can be used to create iPhone apps, which has generated a huge demand for this once-outmoded programming language.

9. Visual Basic .NET

Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) is a multi-paradigm, object-oriented programming language, implemented on the .NET Framework.

10. MATLAB

MATLAB is a programming language developed by MathWorks. It is among the top software environments for scientists and engineers. It started out as a matrix programming language where linear algebra programming was simple. It can be run both under interactive sessions and as a batch job. Alternatives to MATLAB exist including open source software packages. Unlike the other programming languages, MATLAB includes a complete computing environment as well.

11. Delphi

Delphi is a programming language and software development kit (SDK) for desktop, mobile, web, and console applications. Delphi is the successor of Turbo Pascal – the software development system used with the Pascal programming language. It added full object-orientation to the existing language, and since then the language has grown and supports many other modern language features, including generics and anonymous methods, as well as unusual features such as inbuilt string types and native COM support.

12. Swift

Swift, the successor of Objective-C is a relatively clean, fast and error-free programming language that can reduce the length of the code, saving time and energy. Built by Apple, Swift is suitable for building applications for iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS. Since, it is open source, besides iOS developers can also use it on Windows or Linux systems, design their compilers and be assured that their apps are compatible with Apple devices.

13. R

R is an open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. It is capable of conducting numerical computations through additional packages.

14. Ruby

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, object-oriented, and general-purpose programming language, which supports multiple programming paradigms including functional, object-oriented, and imperative.

‘C’ Is TIOBE’s Programming Language Of The Year For 2017

TIOBE (The Importance of Being Earnest), one of the most popular rating index for programming languages, has declared C as the programming language for the year 2017. According to reports last month, C and Kotlin were the top contenders for TIOBE’s 2017 award.

For those unaware, TIOBE Programming Community Index is calculated every month and the ratings are based on the number of search engine queries, which contain the name of the programming language as a keyword in popular search engines such as Google, Bing, and Wikipedia.

In August 2017, C had slipped to its lowest-ever rating (6.477 percent). Since then, C has clawed back and climbed back up to 11.07 percent this month.

“Surprise, surprise, oldtimer language C appears to be the fastest grower of 2017 in the TIOBE index and thus is declared programming language of the year. The C language gained 1.69 [percent] in 2017. Usually this is not sufficient to become language of the year, so C has actually won because there were no outstanding alternatives,” the index stated.

According to the TIOBE Programming Community Index, C was the most popular programming language from 2012 to 2015. However, C started struggling to compete in the web and mobile development world that resulted in the steady decline of the language’s popularity.

“Despite all this, it is remarkable to see that C is getting more popular after a steep downward trend that started at the end of 2015. C had a rating of more than 17 [percent] at that time and lost more than 10 [percent] after that in the next 18 months. A possible reason for this revival is that C is very popular in the growing manufacturing and machine industry (including the automotive market),” according to the index.

Even though Java dropped 3.05 percent compared to January 2017, Java (14.215 percent) still remains at the top of the programming language ranking. While C remains unchanged at rank 2 in the programming language ranking, Python and Erlang were just behind with an index gain of 1.21 and 0.98 percent, respectively.

Other most interesting improvements of the year in the TIOBE index were the programming languages R, which jumped from rank 16 to 8, Erlang (from 44 to 23) and Kotlin (from 89 to 39). However, promising programming languages such as Julia, Hack, Kotlin or Rust were not able to make it to the top 20 or even the top 30.

“Becoming part of the top 10 or even the top 20 requires a large ecosystem of communities and evangelists including conferences,” said Paul Jansen, TIOBE managing director and compiler of the index. “This is not something that can be developed in one year’s time.”

The top 10 on the TIOBE index for the month of January are Java (14.215 percent), C (11.037 percent), C++ (5.603 percent), Python (4.678 percent), C# (3.754 percent), JavaScript (3.465 percent), Visual Basic .Net (3.261 percent), R (2.549 percent), PHP (2.532 percent) and Perl (2.419 percent).

Last year, Google’s Go language (Golang) was awarded the TIOBE Programming Language of the Year for 2016.