XRDS - Fall 2010

Popularity of Programming Languages

TIOBE Index for programming language ratings (June 2010)

18.033 Java 17.809 C 10.757 C++

8.934% 5.868% 5.196%

PHP (Visual) Basic C#

4.266 Python
3.200 Perl
25.937 Other (92 others reported)

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

In addition to networking, ISI has made contributions to the development of integrated circuit design and manufacturing. In 1981, Danny Cohen and others at ISI started MOSIS, a small-volume integrated circuit fabrication service that claims to be the oldest e-commerce site on the web. Since its inception, MOSIS has created more than 50,000 ICs for use in research and product development.

ISI has also been a pioneer in grid computing. ISI’s Center for Grid Technologies was one of the main developers of the Globus Toolkit, a software package that is used by high-performance computing centers all over the world to provide secure access to shared computing and storage resources.

Over the years, ISI expanded into many other areas, making contributions in artificial intelligence, distributed computing, and embedded systems.

RESEARCH

Today, ISI’s research activities cover a broad range of topics in information science. Regardless of what you may be interested in, chances are that ISI has researchers working on it. The 8 divisions that comprise the institute are divided into three primary focus areas: intelligent systems, distributed systems, and hardware systems. The research groups and labs within these focus areas study everything from smart oilfield technologies to biomi-metic brain implants.

ISI continues to expand on its history in networking, investigating new protocols, wireless and sensor networks, and computer security. The Computer Networks Division hosts the DETER testbed, an experimental computer network that can be used to simulate cyber attacks, test countermeasures, and develop tools to detect worms and other malicious code.

If you are interested in high-perfor-

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Punch Cards vs Java

Programming languages have evolved alongside the machines on which their compiled code runs. Comparing two programming languages, the first release of FORTRAN and Java, we can see a monumental change over the past 60 years. From punched cards to virtual machines, the number of innovations in programming language design are countless. —James Stanier

FORTRAN

Designed at IBM

JAVA

Designed at Sun Microsystems

Compiler Released

April 1957

Lead Designer

John W. Backus

Originally Designed for

IBM 704 Mainframe

Implementation

Punched Card

Key words

32

TIOBE Ranking for May 2010¹

27

Ideaology
“Much of my work has come from
being lazy. I didn’t like writing
programs, and so... I started work on
a programming system to make it
easier to write programs.”
—John W. Backus