NewsIoT Leads to Increase in Assembly Language Development

IoT Leads to Increase in Assembly Language Development

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In its July 2016 report on programming language popularity, Tiobe noted a somewhat surprising finding: assembly language is back in the top ten. The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) likely explains the surge in popularity, at least in part. “Why would anyone write code at such a low level, being far less productive if compared to using any other programming language and being vulnerable to all kinds of programming mistakes?” TIOBE blogged. “The only reasonable explanation for this is that the number of very small devices that are only able to run assembly code is increasing. Even your tooth brush or coffee machine are running assembly code nowadays.”

Another possible explanation is that developers are trying to eke out the fastest performance possible, and writing in assembly code offers speed benefits.

The rest of the top ten on the chart were Java (19.804), C (12.238), C++ (6.311), Python (4.166), C# (3.920), PHP (3.272), JavaScript (2.643), Visual Basic .NET (2.517) and Perl (2.428). Objective-C, which was number six in the June ranking, fell all the way down to fifteenth place, and Visual Basic dropped from tenth to thirteenth.

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