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languages such as Lisp or Java (which is underrepresented in Debian due to its
policy of not accepting code that depends on Sun's private virtual machine)
sometimes manage to get in.
Table 21. Programming languages used in Debian GNU/Linux 4.0
Programming language Lines of code (in millions) Percentage
C 155 51%
C++ 55 19%
Shell 30 10%
Perl 8.1 2.9%
Lisp 7.7 2.7%
Python 7.2 2.5%
Java 6.9 2.4%
PHP 3.5 1.24%
Table 22 shows how the most important languages developed in Debian.
Table 22. Languages most used in Debian
Language Debian 2.0 Debian 2.1 Debian 2.2 Debian 3.0
C 19,400,000 76.67% 27,800,00 74.89% 40,900,000 69.12% 66,500,000 63.08%
C++ 1,600,000 6.16% 2,800,000 7.57% 5,980,000 10.11% 13,000,000 12.39%
Shell 645,000 2.55% 1,150,000 3.10% 2,710,000 4.59% 8,635,000 8.19%
Lisp 1,425,000 5.64% 1,890,000 5.10% 3,200,000 5.41% 4,090,000 3.87%
Perl 425,000 1.68% 774,000 2.09% 1,395,000 2.36% 3,199,000 3.03%
Fortran 494,000 1.96% 735,000 1.98% 1,182,000 1.99% 1,939,000 1.84%
Python 122,000 0.48% 211,000 0.57% 349,000 0.59% 1,459,000 1.38%
Tcl 311,000 1.23% 458,000 1.24% 557,000 0.94% 1,081,000 1.02%
There are languages that we could consider to be in the minority that reach
fairly high positions in the classification. This is due to the fact that, whilst
they are only present in a small number of packages, the packages in question
are quite big. Such is the case of Ada, which whilst only being in three packa-
ges (GNAT, an Ada compiler; libgtkada, a link to the GTK library and ASIS, a
system for managing Ada sources) covers 430,000 of the total 576,000 lines of
source code that have been counted in Debian 3.0 for Ada. Another similar ca-
se is Lisp, which only appears in GNU Emacs and XEmacs, but has more than
1,200,000 lines of the approximately four million in the whole distribution.