July 2017 Headline: Go programming language at all time high and in the top 20

July 2017 Headline: Go programming language at all time high and in the top 20

By   11:09 am

The Go programming language continues to rise. This month it is at an all time high and enters the top 10. This is an important landmark for the Go programming language, but it also makes you wonder what's next. Is Go really able to join the big stars in the programming language world and leave languages such as JavaScript and Python behind? We will see. The hipster programming languages Kotlin, Elixir and Hack didn't progress much this month. Kotlin lost 5 positions, Hack lost 6 positions and Elixir is still not in the top 50 losing also 5 positions.

Jul 2017	Jul 2016	Change	Programming Language	Ratings	Change
1	1		Java	13.774%	-6.03%
2	2		C	7.321%	-4.92%
3	3		C++	5.576%	-0.73%
4	4		Python	3.543%	-0.62%
5	5		C#	3.518%	-0.40%
6	6		PHP	3.093%	-0.18%
7	8		Visual Basic .NET	3.050%	+0.53%
8	7		JavaScript	2.606%	-0.04%
9	12		Delphi/Object Pascal	2.490%	+0.45%
10	55		Go	2.363%	+2.20%
11	9		Perl	2.334%	-0.09%
12	14		Swift	2.253%	+0.29%
13	11		Ruby	2.249%	+0.13%
14	10		Assembly language	2.240%	-0.04%
15	17		R	2.105%	+0.59%
16	13		Visual Basic	2.096%	+0.08%
17	16		MATLAB	2.009%	+0.45%
18	15		Objective-C	1.896%	+0.01%
19	21		Scratch	1.813%	+0.73%
20	18		PL/SQL	1.545%	+0.09%

The complete top 50 of programming languages is listed below. 

Position	Programming Language	Ratings
21	SAS	1.492%
22	ABAP	1.448%
23	D	1.338%
24	Dart	1.330%
25	COBOL	1.135%
26	Transact-SQL	0.934%
27	Lua	0.870%
28	Fortran	0.856%
29	Ada	0.856%
30	Scala	0.810%
31	Prolog	0.742%
32	Lisp	0.741%
33	Bash	0.706%
34	LabVIEW	0.702%
35	Logo	0.574%
36	Apex	0.530%
37	Alice	0.495%
38	Rust	0.458%
39	Ladder Logic	0.455%
40	F#	0.426%
41	Haskell	0.425%
42	Hack	0.410%
43	Erlang	0.367%
44	Scheme	0.349%
45	Awk	0.347%
46	MQL4	0.329%
47	RPG (OS/400)	0.306%
48	Kotlin	0.304%
49	Julia	0.304%
50	Groovy	0.300%

The next 50 programming languages

The following list of languages denotes #51 to #100. Since the differences are relatively small, the programming languages are only listed (in alphabetical order).

• (Visual) FoxPro, ABC, ActionScript, APL, AutoLISP, bc, Bourne shell, C shell, CFML, CL (OS/400), Clipper, Clojure, Common Lisp, Crystal, Elixir, Elm, Emacs Lisp, Factor, Forth, Icon, IDL, Inform, Io, J, Korn shell, Magic, Maple, ML, MUMPS, NATURAL, NXT-G, OpenCL, OpenEdge ABL, Oz, PL/I, PowerShell, Q, REXX, Ring, S, Smalltalk, SPARK, SPSS, Standard ML, Stata, Tcl, VBScript, Verilog, VHDL, Wolfram

Very long term history

To see the bigger picture, please find below the positions of the top 10 programming languages of many years back. Please note that these are average positions for a period of 12 months.

Programming Language	2017	2012	2007	2002	1997	1992	1987
Java	1	1	1	1	12	-	-
C	2	2	2	2	1	1	1
C++	3	3	3	3	2	2	4
C#	4	4	7	17	-	-	-
Python	5	7	6	11	27	-	-
Visual Basic .NET	6	19	-	-	-	-	-
PHP	7	6	4	5	-	-	-
JavaScript	8	9	8	8	19	-	-
Perl	9	8	5	4	4	11	-
Assembly language	10	-	-	-	-	-	-
COBOL	25	28	17	9	3	10	8
Lisp	32	12	14	12	9	5	2
Prolog	33	32	26	15	20	12	3
Pascal	106	15	19	97	8	3	5

Programming Language Hall of Fame

The hall of fame listing all "Programming Language of the Year" award winners is shown below. The award is given to the programming language that has the highest rise in ratings in a year. 

Year	Winner
2016	Go
2015	Java
2014	JavaScript
2013	Transact-SQL
2012	Objective-C
2011	Objective-C
2010	Python
2009	Go
2008	C
2007	Python
2006	Ruby
2005	Java
2004	PHP
2003	C++

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What is a Network

What is a Network

By   8:14 pm

The word network can be used to describe a very large and complicated set of equipment. In its most accurate and simplest definition a network refers to the cables and electronic components that amplify the signals going through the cables. The amplifying equipment is necessary to ensure accurate communication and make the signal stronger if it needs to go long distances.

Broader Definition

When many people talk about a network, they are talking about a network using a very broad concept. For instance if someone cannot get to their email, they may say "the network is down". Likewise they may say this if they cannot surf the internet or get to their files. They may not stop to think that in each specific instance there is a single piece of equipment that may provide the capability which they are trying to use.

Most people who work on a corporate or organizational network think about the network in component parts. The three main parts are:

• The cabling and amplifiers mentioned in the first paragraph.
• The workstations which most members of the organization use to access resources.
• Higher powered computers called servers - These are the machines that provide what network administrators call services. Services include the functions that most people try to use such as email, reading and writing files, printing, and getting to the internet. Whenever a user is trying to do something on the network, there is a service or machine providing the capability to do so. 
• This even includes times when someone is trying to get to network resources from their home.

Services

• Email service
• File service - Allows users to use and share file space on a computer with a lot of file space.
• Print service - Allows printing to printers connected on the network.
• Web surfing - Allowing someone to open web pages and see web sites on the internet.
• Filtering out undesired sites on the internet.
• Allowing someone to access the network from the outside (from home).
• Updating virus definitions on workstations.
• Allowing someone to log onto the network.
• Even giving a workstation an address on the network is a service. If your computer does not have an address, it cannot access the internet or any other resource on the network.

A Typical Network

A typical corporate or organizational network is shown below:

Of course there are variations on this network layout and some details have been left out for the sake of simplicity but this drawing should give you some idea about what goes on behind the scene on the network at your organization. Some servers and server functions have not been shown here.

The firewall is the device that protects all computers in the network from many attacks. It allows some types of network traffic into the network from the outside, but usually only for mail or web services. Usually the internet traffic that that is allowed to come into the network is routed to the part of the network labeled "DMZ" on the right side of the diagram. DMZ stands for demilitarized zone and is also called a semi-private network. In this DMZ is a web server which is used to allow people surfing on the internet to see web pages posted by the organization. A mail server is also shown in the DMZ but this could be replaced by a mail relay server while the mail server is placed inside the private network. The mail relay server would forward mail traffic from the outside to the mail server. This would increase the security of the network since a direct connection from the internet to the mail server would not be allowed.

The private network is of course the most secure part of the network. There are several servers on this network including:

• A login server (called a domain controller) which controls everyone’s permissions and access to the network resources such as files. Without this server, they cannot login to the network.
• An address server (called a DHCP server) which provides addresses to computers on the network so they can communicate as discussed earlier.
• A file server which provides common files and a private folder for users.
• A remote access server which allows users to connect to the network by telephone from the outside.

Also the workstations are part of this network.

Conclusion

Knowing the above information, if someone cannot get their mail, they may think the network is down. This is not likely to be the case. The mail server may be down but the network is not likely to be down. The same goes for when someone can't surf the web. There may be a problem with the firewall or the line connecting to the internet, but it is unlikely that the whole network is down. When problems are noticed it is best for the user to describe what they were trying to do and what happened.

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What is the Internet

What is the Internet

By   8:13 pm

The word internet is used to describe a network of networks which incorporate a very large and complicated set of equipment. To understand the internet, there are three areas of discussion which are very helpful. These include the various services provided across the internet, the functions that enable the internet to work, and the various organizations that are part of the internet.

Internet Services

The main services used on the internet include:

• ·         Web browsing - Supported by the HTTP protocol, this functions allows users to view web pages using a web browser.
• ·         E-mail - Allows people to send and receive electronic messages.

Other lesser used services include telnet (allows remote login to computers), FTP (Allows quick file transmission to remote computers), and gopher (An early form of text based form of reading internet documents which is rarely used today).

Internet Functions

The internet provides for the following two functions which support communications. Without the communications support mentioned below, the internet could not function. These two functions are provided by internet service providers listed below under the "Internet Organizations" header.

• ·         Physical lines that data is sent across.
• ·         Routing of data - There are special machines on the internet called routers, that determine where data needs to go to get from the sender of the data to the receiver of the data.

Internet Organizations

• ·         ISPs (Internet Service Providers) - They provide the connection to the internet for users and also provide routers that direct internet traffic.
• ·         Corporations or Web hosting providers with mail servers and web servers - They provide the information posted on the internet and virtual data connections to other mail servers.

There are also other organizations that regulate the internet, providing communication standards and designing new communication standards for improvements. These communication standards are also known as protocols.

Summary

So the internet is a collection of organizations that provide equipment that support the internet functions and services. The internet connects many corporate and organizational private networks together thus enabling all these organizations to easily communicate.

Accessing the Internet

People use an internet browser to access web pages that are available across the internet. Internet browsers include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, and others.

Web pages are created in a marked up form of text file called HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language). The markup within the text indicates document structure showing where paragraphs begin and end, what items are in a list, headers, tables and other document structure.

When people are browsing of surfing the internet, they usually go from place to place by clicking on links. These links are locations for specific pages and indicate the three things:

1.      Protocol being used such as http or ftp

2.     The domain that the web page is found on. This will point to a specific organization's or company's web server.

3.     The location of the page on the server including the directory path and file name.

An example link is "http://pakcomputerr.blogspot.com/". In this case http is the protocol being used, the comptechdoc.org domain indicates where the organization's web server is, and the "/basics/bastutorial/osintro.html" part of the string indicates the folders the file is in and the name of the file.

These links are sometimes called hyperlinks or URLs (Uniform Resource Locators)

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