Bio and Publications

Monday, July 27, 2009

Programming Language Popularity -- Update

I used to rely on the TIOBE Software Programming Community Index.

Today, I learned about the langpop site. The context was following an SD Times blog posting on Haskell. But I got distracted looking at language rankings and what it means to consulting companies.

[Until corrected, I was] particularly drawn to langpop's Amazon listing. It seems like everyone wants books on C, C++ and C#. All other languages are also-rans. Why? [I guessed] that it's because those languages are so (a) hard to work with and (b) are perceived as "old school" where print resources are more prevalent than on-line resources. [Turns out the rankings are screwed up. Dang.]

Marketplace

The langpop aggregate ranking is C, Java, C++, PHP, JavaScript, C# and Python. The TIOBE Community Index is Java, C, C++, PHP, VB, C#, Python.

Similar enough to confirm that a half-dozen languages dominate with two others fighting for position.

Years ago, one of our senior consultants made the case that we really have three fundamental tech-stacks into which our web services had to fit: VB/.Net, C#/.Net, and Java. Corporate IT doesn't demand a lot of PHP or Python from us.

Perhaps those are opportunities for growth. Or perhaps there isn't enough corporate IT demand for those frameworks.

2 comments:

  1. Hi,

    langpop.com guy here. The amazon rankings are screwed up right now, as Amazon seems to have some kind of malfunction in their search that they didn't used to. Sorry to disappoint.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Check out

    State of the Computer Book Market 2008, part 4 -- The Languages by Mike Hendrickson

    http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/state-of-the-computer-book-mar-22.html

    ReplyDelete

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