Programming language rankings get regular headlines, and they should, at least from trend trackers like us. Among my favorite is the RedMonk quarterly, published this week. I like the methodology of their system, which extracts data from GitHub and Stack Overflow and combines them for “a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction.”

In other words, it correlates what the cool kids are talking about with actual language usage “in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.” It’s a mix that makes it meaningful.

The latest ranking was posted by veteran industry analyst Stephen O’Grady on his RedMonk blog. “GitHub and Stack Overflow are used here, first, because of their size, and second, because of their public exposure of the data necessary for the analysis,” he wrote.

O’Grady’s post includes thoughtful observations about JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, R, Kotlin, Rust, and Dart.

There’s quite a lot of change afoot in the programming world, the analysts found, but constant has been the rise of Python, which has maintained its top ranking ahead of Java. “Java was extremely hot on Python’s heels – and was in fact closer to the number one ranking than to PHP behind it – but Python’s ability to defend its new high ranking is notable,” O’Grady wrote.

Half of the Top 20 languages experienced “a degree of movement,” O’Grady added, “which is very unusual. It’s difficult to attribute this definitively to any higher level macro trends, but the data is consistent with an industry that picked the pace back up in the last two quarters of the year after the initial chaos of lockdowns and so on gave way to livable if extremely suboptimal new routines.”

JavaScript is holding its own in the rankings. “[I]t is worth noting just how robust JavaScript’s performance remains,” O’Grady observed. “In spite of all of the competition from up and coming languages, all the discussion of fragmentation and even criticisms of JavaScript the language itself, it remains remarkably popular.

JavaScript pull requests are up 453% since Q1 of January of 2018, and they were up 96% from the last quarter “on an already massive base of commits.” ‘

‘Simply put, JavaScript remains – its detractors notwithstanding – a force of nature like no other within the industry,” he wrote, “and there are no indications in the data that this is likely to change any time soon.”

TypeScript, which is a superset of JavaScript, moved up for the sixth of its latest eight quarterly RedMonk rankings, “and its popularity is evident when one looks around the industry.” Ruby is on a gentle long-term downward trajectory, the analysts found. Go is slipping, too. R, a language for statistical computing and graphics, appears to be on a slow upswing. Both Kotlin and Rust showed signs of growing popularity. And Dart, an open source, purely object-oriented, optionally typed, and a class-based language, has risen since the advent of the Flutter framework.

Th RedMonk report surrounds a cool plotting of the language rankings with detailed analysis of key trends over the past quarter. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a must read.

Diffblue, a UK-based startup founded by University of Oxford researchers and focused on automating software development through artificial intelligence (AI), today announced that it is making a free version available for developers on open source software projects.

The new company launched its first product, an AI-powered Java unit testing solution, in September. Diffblue’s Community Edition IntelliJ IDEA plugin, available now on the JetBrains marketplace. interactively writes unit tests for Java applications, increasing test coverage, and helping devs find regressions in future code changes.

“How Diffblue works for experienced Java hands, is it uses reinforcement learning to automatically write regression unit tests for Java apps,” a company spokesperson explained in an email. “They reflect the current behavior of the application and so can be used to find regressions in new code commits, and it writes test that look like a human wrote them. Diffblue Cover (the company’s flagship product) makes full use of Spring test infrastructure and mocking to write canonical Spring tests. Unlike other tooling, Cover can also automatically maintain its test suite as the code evolves, updating just the tests that need to be re-written after a change.”

In the first 15 days after the Diffblue Cover Community Edition launch, developers wrote more than 21,000 Java unit tests, which saved about 580 days of manual effort (assuming 10 minutes per test, 6 hours of productive time per developer day), the company said.

Diffblue Cover is based on reinforcement learning (RL) research conducted at Oxford by the company’s founders. RL is a method of training machine learning (ML) models to take the best action to maximize reward in a particular situation–in other words, to learn by trial and error. It’s the same method used in AlphaGo, the Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind’s software that beat the human world champion player of Go.

Where most unit test generators create boilerplate code for tests that must be completed by developers to get functioning tests, the company explained in a statement, Cover is able to create complete human-readable unit tests that are ready to run immediately. In fact, the company claims that its solution creates Java tests at speeds 10X-100X faster than humans that are also easy for developers to understand, and automatically maintains the tests as the code evolves, even on applications with tens of millions of lines of code.

“Our goal is to be the leader in applying AI to code, starting with unit tests, the critical foundation that allows developers to more frequently ship higher quality software,” said Diffblue CEO Mathew Lodge, in a statement. “We help organizations reduce time to ship, ship more often, and ship code with fewer defects while freeing up developers to focus more time on the most engaging part of their jobs. Companies on the journey to digital transformation, especially during this COVID pandemic, can’t keep up with the rapid software changes required to reorient their businesses. Automating unit testing on new and legacy code can accelerate their journey to success.”

The free version (downloadable from the JetBrains marketplace) was created for developers using the IntelliJ IDEA integrated development environment, the most popular IDE for enterprise Java. The commercial editions install in less than five minutes, the company says, and provide 100 percent automated Java unit test writing and integrate directly into continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) systems. The technology behind Diffblue Cover can also be extended to support other popular programming languages, the company says, such as Python, JavaScript, and C#.

“As enterprises all over the world increasingly emphasize the velocity of their application development processes, unit testing becomes more and more critical,” said RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady, in a statement. “This is particularly true for the millions of enterprise Java developers worldwide, who are charged with maintaining countless critical applications for businesses large and small. The challenge is that tests can be tedious to write, and developers would prefer to devote their time and attention to writing code if the task of writing tests can be automated. This is the precise opportunity that Diffblue was built for.”