As an open source (especially GNU/Linux) lover, I read lots of articles daily (Linux Today, FSDaily and Unix/Linux section in DIGG are my most favorites and I spent about 2 hours approximately on reading articles and blogs) about GNU/Linux, Open Source and battle for survival of the fittest that’s happening in the IT world.
I’ve come across thousands of articles about how marvelous the Open Source is and then many articles preaching Open Source and then some articles lashing out Proprietary Software and then some testimonials of a normal person on how moving to Open Source apps saved his life and his family and then corporate that has benefited by moving to Open Source.
Among the category of articles I’ve read as stated above, the most fascinating articles are the ones that talks about Open Source versus Proprietary battles and Patents. Going through thousands of articles on daily basis, being an analyst developer, something strike my mind. Among the wars that are happening in Software world that makes it to the headlines, there is another type of Open Source vs Proprietary war going on without anyone taking any notice of it. It’s the war of programming languages.
Officially there are 338 languages exists until today (check Wikipedia or look for the link to Wikipedia at the bottom of this article). Most of those languages exist in experimental basis within laboratory and many other are restricted to special purpose and some are on verge of becoming extinct while the rest are commercial where most developers across the globe try to be an expert.
My interest is to find the programming languages that lead the most wanted list and their license category which determines whether Open Source is going to be the leader or the Proprietary. Further googling, I found the following links which predicts the languages that are the most active and a must-have thing in the job seekers’ list.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2016415,00.asp
The below is the link to an article which lists the Top 10 programming languages of the future based on the votes from Red Canary website.
http://foundread.com/2007/09/07/top-10-programming-languages-of-the-future-you-voted/
The below link accepts votes (still open) on which are the languages which will rule the world by 2013.
http://www.redcanary.ca/view/top-10-programming
Now, going across those articles (and taking part in the survey from Red Canary), I found sort of interesting pattern that emerge which tells the silent or unseen war that is going on in the Software Development world.
If you see most of the languages listed for Survey, at least 6-7 of those languages are open source and the closed source languages are very minimal (and most belongs to Microsoft except C/C++/C++0x).
Though I have a special interest in C/C++ family (I don’t include C#, Java, etc as C/C++ family) and greater interest in C++0x – the language of the future (it’s personal), the survey result shows the anonymous king of programming languages which leads by miles: Python (Check out the survey result from http://www.redcanary.ca/view/top-10-programming after taking part in survey) which is Open Source.
I have personally created a list based on the survey results obtained from Red Canary and by altering the list given by http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2016415,00.asp , which has 10 Programming Languages of future and being (and will be) used vastly. I have excluded AJAX and JavaScript and included language D and Visual Basic .NET from the list provided by eweek based on the survey results from Red Canary.
Further, the whole list is divided into three categories: Open Source, Proprietary and Neutral (does not require any license). There are few more things I have to mention about the licenses before I continue which I have given as notes at the end of article, right above the References section. Please read those notes before proceeding further.
The below are my list of programming languages categorized according to the license requirements.
Open Source:
PHP - An open-source, interpretive, server-side, cross-platform, HTML scripting language, especially well-suited for Web development as it can be embedded into HTML pages.
Perl - Perl is an open-source, cross-platform, server-side interpretive programming language used extensively to process text through CGI programs.
Ruby and Ruby on Rails - Ruby is a dynamic, object-oriented, open-source programming language; Ruby on Rails is an open-source Web application framework written in Ruby that closely follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture.
Java - An object-oriented programming language developed by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s.
Python - An interpreted, dynamically object-oriented, open-source programming language that utilizes automatic memory management.
D - The D programming language, also known simply as D, is an object-oriented, imperative, multiparadigm system programming language by Walter Bright of Digital Mars.
Proprietary:
C#.NET - A general-purpose, compiled, object-oriented programming language developed by Microsoft as part of its .NET initiative, it evolved from C and C++.
Visual Basic .Net - An object-oriented language implemented on Microsoft's .Net framework.
Neutral:
C - A standardized, general-purpose programming language, it's one of the most pervasive languages and the basis for several others (such as C++).
C++ - is a general-purpose, statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, usually compiled language supporting procedural programming, data abstraction, object-oriented programming, and generic programming.
It’s clearly evident from the above list that the Open Source and Neutral Licensed programming languages are the ones which rules the Software Development at the moment and will rule the Software Development in the future. But saying so, I am eagerly waiting for C++0x which will start make tides in Software Development world in next 4 years time.
While I am sure that C++ will be the best programming language to exist even by 2025, I put all my money behind on Open Sourced programming languages to lead the race by 2025.
Though Microsoft and other proprietary language developers (Unfortunately I can’t be specific about anyone else except Microsoft here) will put a hard fight to promote their programming languages and win more developers in years to come, I believe those will be one last effort against Open Sourced programming languages before their ultimate defeat and nothing else.
On that note, the emerging developers who are exclusively tied with Microsoft technologies at the moment it’s time to have one or two Open Source programming languages in their Resumes.
Thank You.
Notes:
- I have also included Java under Open Source category since most of the Java Technology is already available under GPL license.
- Though language D is officially not an entirely Open Source, check the below link which states that most of the part are Open Sourced and the rest are being open sourced (http://www.digitalmars.com/d/faq.html#q5 )
References:
Alphabetical List of Programming Languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_list_of_programming_languages
Comparision of Programming Languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages
D (programming language)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_%28programming_language%29
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/faq.html
C++0x
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B0x
Java (programming language)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)
http://www.sun.com/2006-1113/feature/index.jsp
Top 10 programming languages of the future
http://www.redcanary.ca/view/top-10-programming
Top 10 programming languages of the future - you voted
http://foundread.com/2007/09/07/top-10-programming-languages-of-the-future-you-voted/
