TIOBE's Language-Popularity Index Sees A New Top 10 Language: Assembly

[biometrics]

TIOBE Index for July 2016

July Headline: Assembly Language enters the Top 10 again

It might come as surprise that the lowest level programming language that exists has re-entered the TIOBE index top 10. Why would anyone write code at such a low level, being far less productive if compared to using any other programming language and being vulnerable to all kinds of programming mistakes? The only reasonable explanation for this is that the number of very small devices that are only able to run assembly code is increasing. Even your tooth brush or coffee machine are running assembly code nowadays. Another reason for adoption is performance. If performance is key, nobody can beat assembly code. Other interesting moves this month are: good old Tcl jumps from #65 to #48, CFML (ColdFusion) from #102 to #66 and Maple from #94 to #74.

The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the*best*programming language or the language in which*most lines of code*have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found*here.

http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=index

Nice, my x86, 8051 and PIC assembler experience might come in handy again.

 

[_kabal_]

Delphi and COBOL also moved up the ranks....

 

[biometrics]

Delphi and COBOL also moved up the ranks....

I always say, compilers never die ...

Java and C# are the flavours of the month in SA currently as I recently discovered. Certainly if you want a corporate job.

Of the top-20 languages, when I add up those I use I get to 19.803%, guess that's not bad considering Java at 19.804%. I use Java a bit but not all the time so didn't include it.

 

[cguy]

http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=index

Nice, my x86, 8051 and PIC assembler experience might come in handy again.

For sure. . I already to regular asm work - although 90% of the time I will try use C and intrinsics to generate the asm code I want (which I decompile and check), rather than coding in it directly. My primary reason is performance, and more recently this has been driven by the lack of performance increases for single core processing, due to the big slow down in fab process technology, due to physical limitations.

 

[biometrics]

For sure. . I already to regular asm work - although 90% of the time I will try use C and intrinsics to generate the asm code I want (which I decompile and check), rather than coding in it directly. My primary reason is performance, and more recently this has been driven by the lack of performance increases for single core processing, due to the big slow down in fab process technology, due to physical limitations.

I haven't used it regularly for more then ten years. But I love the purity of it. High level developers of nowadays have no idea why data types exist.

 

[biometrics]

If I add up the percentages of the top-20 languages I've used over the past 20 years (in various degrees of expertise) I get to 50.632%

What do you get?

 

[cguy]

If I add up the percentages of the top-20 languages I've used over the past 20 years (in various degrees of expertise) I get to 50.632%

What do you get?

I get 54.22% if I include all the ones in the top 20 that I've used professionally. +5.697% = 59.917% if I consider (Acorn/Applesoft/GW)GWBASIC as VB and Borland/Turbo Pascal as Delphi/Object-Pascal, and messing about with COBOL in high school.

 

[[)roi(]]

69% if I include top 20 used professionally over 20 years (71% in top 50); in the last year; it's 39% in top 20 -- for assembler: it's primarily read (e.g. debugging with hopper), haven't written something in it for >15 years

 

[kripstoe]

For sure. . I already to regular asm work - although 90% of the time I will try use C and intrinsics to generate the asm code I want (which I decompile and check), rather than coding in it directly. My primary reason is performance, and more recently this has been driven by the lack of performance increases for single core processing, due to the big slow down in fab process technology, due to physical limitations.

HFT? Can't recall if you had it in a thread somewhere, but what do you do again? Sounds rather fascinating.

 

[cguy]

HFT? Can't recall if you had it in a thread somewhere, but what do you do again? Sounds rather fascinating.

Mostly MF - once you have the signal to execute though, you want to do it as fast as possible (others may see the same signal), and also the research is one huge HPC problem, where a 50% speed up can be the equivalent to having 2x the supercomputers.

 

[The_Librarian]

http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=index

Nice, my x86, 8051 and PIC assembler experience might come in handy again.

Cool I coded in x86 once...