Literature Review

With the advancement in different fields of computer science, many different programming languages have been introduced in the market. With different structural and problem solving approaches, each language has its own area of expertise and the services it offers. The popularity of language depends largly upon which criteria youre used to measure the popularity. Like, the language most commonly known may not be the language most commonly used. Some criteras for measuring the popularity of languages are language most commonly learnt by beginners to learn the basics of programming, no of jobs offered for a certain language, language popularity with respect to the working field. For beginners, two programming languages keep appearing as suggestion for beginners to learn their basics of programming in; these two languages are C and Python. TIOBE index also indicates C as the most popular language in this regard. A survey at stephenfrasier.com regards C as the most common suggestion by experts to learn for the beginners while Python being the second one. While C and Python maybe good for learning at the beginning level to build your programming concepts, they may not be the most popular when it comes to finding jobs. In general, PHP is the most popular languages when it comes to jobs offered. According to job tractor monthly stats, 717 jobs are available in the month of may on their site presently in the month of may for develpors working in PHP. Second most popular language with respect to jobs offered is java with 683 jobs available. Objective C, Java, SQL and JavaScript are next in the list with 458, 345, 293 and 245 jobs offered. Similarly, stats from April and March show PHP to be the most popular language while stats of February 2013 show JAVA to be first with PHP on the second. While talking about most preferred programming language, it will help the reader to know that which big sites use which languages. Google.com based on Linux server platform is using C, Java, C++, MYSQL & PHP, with PHP being used on the server side. Facebook uses PHP, MySQL and C++. Youtub uses C, JAVA and MySQL while Microsoft.com and live.com use ASP.NET. Wordpress also uses PHP and MySQL. Seeing the programming languages used by one of the most famous websites in the world with a huge fanbase and traffic, it is evident that PHP and MySQL are very poweful when it comes to handling large database and are used by many famous websites. A reasearch done on the languages preffered by web programmers shows that in web programming, PHP is unarguably the most used programming language being used in the server side. Data collected from different websites show that on the whole, 78.9% of websites use PHP as their server side while 20.1% use ASP.NET.

The research ranked the websites according to their traffic and then saw the trends of their server side programmig language prefences. For 78% of top 1,000,000 websites, PHP is used on their server side. 73.2% of websites out of top 100,000 websites use PHP while 65.3% of top 10,000 have PHP running on their server side. As for ASP.NET, these numbers are relatively less. 20.1% of top 1,000,000 websites use ASP.NET while 22.3% of top 100,000 websites do the same. 24.9% of top 10,000 and 29.2% of top 1000 websites have ASP.NET on their server side. Talking about the game development, the most popular language in the field of game development is C++. Above 50% of game developers use C++ for developing games. C# is second in the race followed closely by Python. The most popular platforms for game development are windows, play stations, wii and social networking sites like facebook and myspace. Of course, the selection of the language largly depends upon the platform being used.