Have you ever wondered what the most popular programming language in history is? Or the "oldest" one? And whether there is a popularity "ranking" of languages that can guide a career in coding?
In this article we will try to reveal these (and other) curiosities by taking an imaginary (but useful!) journey through the most widely used coding languages in the world.
Let's say first of all that it is not always possible to draw up infallible rankings ordering programming languages by features and use. However, not everyone knows that there are authoritative statistical sources such as the TIOBE Index and PYPL PopularitY of Programming Languages, which make it possible to reach at least reliable conclusions. Of course, bear in mind that the information in this article, largely drawn from those sources, may change over time.
In any case, we hope you will learn things about programming and its history that you perhaps did not know.
1) What is the first programming language in history?
The low-level language "assembly" is generally considered the first, born at the same time as the ENIAC, the first computer in history, in the 1940s.
It should be remembered, however, that at the time the concept of "programming language" was not quite the same as today. Assembly language actually means a family of low-level languages tied to the specific hardware architecture. This concept later evolved to meet growing needs and to make software development more accessible and powerful.
If instead we consider programming languages more broadly, meaning a high-level language that lets you express instructions more abstractly and independently of the hardware architecture, then Fortran (Formula Translation) is certainly the first programming language in history.
Fortran was developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and numerical computing and, after several revisions and improvements, is still in use. Today it is used in many scientific and engineering applications, especially in scientific computing, simulation, numerical modelling and data analysis. The most recent versions, such as Fortran 2008, continue to be developed and maintained.
The reference website for learning this language is: https://fortran-lang.org/
2) What is the most popular programming language in history? And today?
As we said, this question cannot be answered infallibly, but cross-checking the sources already mentioned, it would seem to be C.
The C language was developed in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie at AT&T's Bell Labs and had a significant impact on the evolution of programming languages, serving as the basis for other languages such as C++ and Objective-C. Its portability, efficiency and flexibility contributed to its spread in many fields, from operating systems to embedded applications.
In recent decades, however, another programming language has come into massive use. According to industry statistics, we are talking about Java.
Java is a language known for its portability, thanks to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which allows code to run on different platforms without recompiling it.
If you want to try it, here are the installation files and documentation: https://www.java.com/
Java has also been widely used in the development of enterprise, web and mobile applications.
By cross-checking statistical data, it is possible to draw up a sort of ranking of the most used languages. However, what we present is not a historical ranking (which would not be very useful) but a current one, updated to 2023, the year that has just ended.
According to the TIOBE Index (whose assessments, very similar to PYPL's, are based on surveys of qualified engineers and computer scientists, courses and third-party vendors worldwide, and data from the most popular search engines), the ten most popular languages among coders worldwide are, in order:
- 1st Python
- 2nd C
- 3rd C++
- 4th Java
- 5th C#
- 6th JavaScript
- 7th PHP
- 8th Visual Basic
- 9th SQL
- 10th Scratch
A top ten that, besides confirming the historical popularity of C and Java (and their variants), reveals that the most popular language today is Python.
Python is a high-level, interpreted, general-purpose programming language created by Guido van Rossum at the end of the 1980s. Known for its clear, readable syntax, which makes it accessible to both beginners and advanced programmers, it offers support for procedural programming, a large standard library, high portability and a very active community.
It is used in many fields, including web development, artificial intelligence, data analysis, systems automation, game development and much more.
If you want to start programming in Python, this is the place to begin: https://www.python.org/
Using Python as an example, we would like to stress again how the TIOBE Index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date, or to make a strategic decision about which language to adopt for a new piece of software.
3) Is COBOL really "in great demand"?
For some time a rumour has been circulating in the job market that COBOL, although far from new, is still very widely used and therefore in great demand. So we asked ourselves: are we sure this is really the case? Could it be a myth born from certain newspaper headlines?
Well, looking at the TIOBE Index and PYPL (which rank COBOL 20th, with a popularity of 0.78%, and 28th, with 0.22%, respectively), as well as other sources including discussions on Quora and GitHub, we concluded that this is not quite true.
COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) is a programming language developed for commercial and business purposes. Created in the 1950s and known for its focus on business data and transaction management, it was one of the first languages designed to be understandable and usable by people who were not IT experts, in particular systems analysts and business users.
These features made it very popular for developing applications in banking, insurance, government and finance. Many business systems dating back decades were written in COBOL, and full migration to newer technologies, which is still ongoing, can be expensive and risky. Although in some areas, especially where there are many legacy systems, demand for COBOL skills may still be significant, the number of new projects using it has fallen over time and is now very small, with many organisations preferring more modern technologies.
So, unless you already have a well-paid job agreement, we would advise against studying it and recommend more modern languages instead.
4) Whatever happened to Pascal?
We want to close this article by trying to answer the question: "Whatever happened to Pascal?"
We asked this question in this interview with our Fabrizio Intrieri, project manager at ESSE I, and he answered promptly, being an expert in the languages derived from it.
Pascal is a programming language developed at the end of the 1960s and widely used from 1970 onwards. It was conceived as a teaching language to teach the principles of structured programming, emphasising clarity and precision of code.
Precisely thanks to these features, for many years it was used in many Italian schools and universities to teach programming.
There have been several evolutions and variants of Pascal: the most important is Delphi, an integrated development environment (IDE) based on Pascal. Delphi added advanced features such as object-oriented programming and event handling, becoming popular for developing desktop applications on Windows.
Here too is the website to start from if you want to find out more: https://learndelphi.org/
We think it was worth revisiting this "romantic" language too (we are sure many have wondered what happened to it) to pay tribute to its "father", Niklaus Wirth, who passed away very recently.
This article is dedicated above all to him. But also to those who, like us, love computing, programming and its more or less popular languages.
