Communications of the ACM
Big Data Sparks Interest in Statistical Programming Languages
Statistical programming languages appear to be growing in popularity thanks to big data.
Credit: Informatica
The latest Tiobe index for language popularity features several statistical programming languages, including R, which was ranked 12th; MatLab, which was ranked 24th; LabView, ranked 63rd; Mathematica, ranked 80th; S, ranked 84th; and Julia, ranked 126th.
"Thanks to the big data hype, computational statistics is gaining attention nowadays," Tiobe notes in its assessment, which examines languages based on data from search engines. Statistical programming languages will continue to rise, predicts Tiobe's Paul Jansen.
However, he says there will be a ceiling for the advance of statistical languages because they lack general purpose utility.
The open source R language is up from 15th place in October and 31st place a year ago. Still, R's share is only 1.5 percent, which is not a lot, according to Jansen. The top five spots for this month's index are C with 17.47 percent, Java and Objective-C with 9.06 percent, and C++ and C# with 4.99 percent.
"Java will rise again above 15 percent the next few years," Jansen notes. "This is mainly thanks to the success of Android. There is also a future for C++ because it is one of the leading languages in the computer game industry, which is still a flourishing business."
From InfoWorld
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