Shawn Driscoll's Tech Blog


Stuff That Happened in the Past

Thursday, April 15, 2021

Python Still Looking for its Ceiling

I thought I'd do another one of these. Not much has changed since last year, other than Python's continued climb. This time I added JavaScript, Java, R, and TypeScript to the mix.

One can see the niche areas that some languages have held onto. There's not quite any death spiral or race to the bottom as of yet. Obviously, Objective-C is not a thing. Swift replaced it. Flash is not a thing. Apple and Microsoft killed it. I haven't been charting them because there is no data to map.

Notice that TypeScript has carved away at JavaScript some. Python has stolen a lot of Java's thunder. And R has slowly been growing over the last decade. It's almost as if Python and R go hand in hand in some coding circles.

One thing that is helping Python a lot is the sheer amount of C libraries that it has wrapped itself around. Since most versions of Python are written in C, it just makes sense that Python will one day die with the most C toys.