Computer Language Popularity Trend

Computer Language Popularity Trend

This page gives a visual report of computer languages's popularity, as
indicated by their traffic level in newsgroups. This is not a
comprehensive or fair survey, but does give some indications of
popularity trends.

http://xahlee.org/lang_traf/index.html

Xah
xah@xahlee.org
∑ http://xahlee.org/

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

Xah Lee wrote:Wow, java is a low level industrial language? ;)

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

Thus spoke Xah Lee (on 2006-09-27 05:03):
When the Samurai of medieval Japan were confronted
with new 'battlefield language', e.g. early Shotguns,
they resisted because one could push any peasant
behind a gun -- thus nullifying the result of
the Samurai Art of Warfare that required a life
full of learning - in the end wiping out a
complete culture.

Same trend here - the reason is: 'cost' ;-)


Regards & scnr

Mirco

f'up: clpm, clp

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

On 9/27/06, Mirco Wahab <peace.is.our.profession@gmx.dewrote:shouldn't this be "they [the Samurai] did not resist"?

--
Ramon Diaz-Uriarte
Bioinformatics Unit
Spanish National Cancer Centre (CNIO)
http://ligarto.org/rdiaz

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

Xah Lee wrote:Careful there with the sweeping generalizations and quick judgments
about languages :)

Furthermore, it's nice to conclude that Lisp is getting more popular,
but we also have to take into account global trends (maybe more people
are using usenet in general? maybe the total number of programmers in
the world is increasing?).

Still, it's nice to see trends plotted out like that, thanks for the
work :)

mfh

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

In article <1159349867.827187.270390@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups .com>, mark.hoemmen@gmail.com wrote:I just read "PHP as a language is rather dry and business-like",
and fell off my chair.

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

Thus spoke Ramon Diaz-Uriarte (on 2006-09-27 11:01):
The "resisted" believing all the buzz,
e.g.: "armies made of dudes with guns" ...

(and tried to preserve their Art,
which did not work in the end -
"the Art of Killing" was replaced
by "mass production of deaths" on
the battlefield ...)

Regards,

M.

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

On 9/27/06, Mirco Wahab <peace.is.our.profession@gmx.dewrote:OK, I think I see it.
Yeap, that I saw.

Thansk,

R.

--
Ramon Diaz-Uriarte
Bioinformatics Unit
Spanish National Cancer Centre (CNIO)
http://ligarto.org/rdiaz

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

mark.hoemmen@gmail.com wrote:Finally, a contribution of substance from lambda. Who woulda thunk it?

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

I, too, attempt to track the popularity of computer languages, but I
like to look at the job boards. My theory is that the number of
employers looking for particular skills indicates the relative
popularity of the language. This is a somewhat crude measure,
particularly with Microsoft technologies (VB, VB6, VB.NET, VS, etc). I
think it's much more reliable with open source languages, such as Java,
Perl, PHP, and so on.

'Popularity' is a slippery concept as well. C isn't real popular in
terms of jobs, but it is in terms of compensation. In system
administration (which I also follow), Windows has large numbers of
jobs, but a low level of compensation. OSes like AIX on the other hand
have lower numbers of available jobs, but those tend to be more highly
compensated. One could argue that compensation is a function of
popularity, with the more unpoular technologies having carrying a
bigger price to attract more people -- an example of supply and demand
-- but then one would have to argue that garbade collectors should be
more highly compensated that physicians.

You can also get a rough measure ot the popularity of web scripting
languages from an analysis of the URLs. The last time I did this was in
2003, and as I recall, these were the results:
PHP 30% and increasing
Perl 28% and falling
ASP 25% and falling fast
ColdFusion 6% and steady
Java and JSP 5% and increasing
others, Python, Ruby, ...

Again, this is a very rough measure. Java, for instance, is used by big
companies (like auto manufacturers, aerospace industries, defense
contractors, big retailers, etc.) One site/one vote isn't
representative necessarily, plus the bigger companies employ more
people than the smaller companies that tend to use FOSS.

Finally, in my area, we have a lot of banking and insurance jobs. These
companies internally are exclusively Microsoft shops. It's virtually
impossible to work there unless you know Visual Studio and SQL Server.
Misrosoft people tend not to prowl the newsgroups, and I would suspect
that any measurement based on numbers of newsgroup postings would be
skewed for this reason.

CC

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

"mark.hoemmen@gmail.com" <mark.hoemmen@gmail.comwrites:
Such things are all Xah does. Look at the distribution list for this
message - of what possible use is cross-posting something like this to
five different language groups, unless you're trying to start a cross-
group argument?

In short - Please don't feed the trolls.

sherm--

--
Web Hosting by West Virginians, for West Virginians: http://wv-www.net
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

Xah Lee wrote:Suggestions:
Provide a log-scale plot. You can clearly see that there are
exponential trends in the data, these will turn into lines in
log-scale. You can also see that the plots get more widely distributed
as the number of posts increase. This too will be minimized in
log-scale.

Make the horizontal scale for the `scripting' languages the same as
the others. I know there isn't data out on the left of the graph, but
it surprised me to see points out there until I noticed the scale
change.

For the Google trends, try looking for `java programming' or `written
in python' to avoid picking up the island and the popular comedy troupe.

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

cartercc@gmail.com wrote:At the site I'm working on, you'd see a URL like
http://www.whatever.com/login or http://www.whatever.com/boards?id=131
-- how would you count them? Such (extensionless) URLs are far more
common in the Python, Ruby, and Java world in my experience than the
PHP, Perl, and ASP world, so my first instinct looking at your numbers
is to believe they're just biased toward languages that more often put
the extension in the URL.

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

Joe Marshall wrote:I'd also encourage normalisation so the highest value on all scales is
the same height. The absolute numbers are neither as interesting nor as
significant as the trends.

regards
Steve
--
Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119
Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com
Skype: holdenweb http://holdenweb.blogspot.com
Recent Ramblings http://del.icio.us/steve.holden

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

In article <efd9g0$sn5$1@mlucom4.urz.uni-halle.de>, Mirco Wahab wrote:"early Shotguns" :D. Your mastery of the history of
firearms overwhelms me.

--
Christopher Mattern

"Which one you figure tracked us?"
"The ugly one, sir."
"...Could you be more specific?"

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

In comp.lang.lisp Jon Ribbens <jon+usenet@unequivocal.co.ukwrote:Well, business really is that crazy! :-)


--
Web (en): http://www.no-spoon.de/ -*- Web (de): http://www.frell.de/

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

Xah Lee wrote:The only problem being that in the last five years, there are now a
multiplicity of options for discussing any of these languages, in places
that are not Usenet.

For example, Sun hosts a variety of bulletin boards on its java.net
site. Likewise Microsoft has it's "communities".

My guess is that if you included all the new avenues the other languages
would have growth curves about the same shape as for LISP.




--
Texeme Construct

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

There is one index at : http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

It isn't much reliable, put still I think it is a bit reliable.

Also, you might use number of open source projects at Sourceforge for
the given language for giving assumptions, or number of job openings at
Monster, i.e.




--
Mladen Adamovic
http://www.online-utility.org
http://www.cheapvps.info
http://www.vpsreview.com

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

sjdevnull@yahoo.com wrote:Yeah. CGI is more than Perl, CGI also includes TCL and Python, and
perhaps some others. In my limited JSP developments, we didn't use file
extensions.

I don't think you can use any measure as an accurate yardstick, but
rather as an impressionistic canvas. Just because there are five times
as many .cgi extensions as .jsp extensions doesn't mean that Perl is
five times more popular that Java. Also, web apps tend to stick around,
and we don't have a sure way to gauge the age of these pages, so it
could be that, in the last year, the ration of JSP to CGI pages is five
to one in favor of JSP.

To some extent, the popularity of technologies is driven by the
available resources. If there are many more Java programmers than Perl
programmers, then Java wil appear to be more popular, and vice versa. I
know that colleges and universities teach Java in their CS and IS
courses, and they don't teach Perl.

CC

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

cartercc@gmail.com writes:
Exactly. You can't measure "popularity" without defining the term.
Xah Lee appears to define popularity based on the number of posts made
in a given language's Usenet group (for his choice of which group
belongs to a given language). Given that a substantial portion of the
recent posts in each group is likely an off-topic Xah Lee crosspost,
this metric is probably unreliable even for measuring his own intended
metric: the amount of discussion taking place about each language on
Usenet.

How do you define popularity? Do you define it by how much people
talk about a language on the internet? How many programs are written
in it? How many lines of code are written in it? How many CPU cycles
are used to run code written in it?

None of these is fair, as it is. More people use Ada than talk about
it online, because it is a common language in classified government
work. More people talk about Lisp online than use it, because their
jobs or other circumstances limit their choice to other languages.
Moreover, most people use more than one language, and after a long day
at the office of pumping out Java or Perl, they go home and talk about
Lisp or C#. Online discussion isn't a measure of actual use, even if
you can actually measure the total amount of discussion.

The number of programs written is likely to be grossly inaccurate.
People write millions of small C or Perl utilities all the time, to a
combined effect of less problem-solving than one big Java application.

The number of lines of code written in a language is also unfair,
because it takes more lines of C than of almost any other language to
solve most problems.

The number of CPU cycles spent running code that was written in a
given language is also unfair, because, for instance, Ruby code burns
more CPU cycles to do something than C code does, in the average case.

So, how do you define popularity?

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

Thus spoke Chris Mattern (on 2006-09-27 19:09):You want a fight? With a muzzle-loaded gun?
Three shots for everybody -- 5 minutes time?

BTW: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket)
The date of the origin of muskets remains
unknown, but they are mentioned as early as
the late 15th century, and they were primarily
designed for use by infantry. Muskets became
obsolete by the middle of the 19th century,
as rifles superseded them.



Regards

Mirco

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

Sherm Pendley wrote:While Xah does have a reputation for trolling, and the crossposting
borders on pathological, you must admit that he presents here a bit of
nice and illuminating research. We probably should encourage him when he
does worthwhile things, and perhaps, in the future, he will put more
time towards them and less time towards the trolling for which he is famous.

James

--
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.jamesstroud.com/

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

John Bailo wrote:Good point - especially given the sheer volume of the microsoft groups.
For example, I follow microsoft.public.excel.programming (and thus have
been quite interested in the discussion in fa.haskell recently about
finding a way for VBA to call Haskell functions) regularly and it
almost always has hundreds of posts a day - most of them business-like
discussions of code. Few of the traditional comp groups can boast of
such volume - so any attempt to measure an ill-defined popularity by
focusing on them will be skewed.

-semiopen

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

At Wednesday 27/9/2006 07:30, Mirco Wahab wrote:
From the name I guess Ramon speaks Spanish; "resistir" in Spanish
has a similar meaning, but not exactly the same, as "to resist"



Gabriel Genellina
Softlab SRL





__________________________________________________
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Todo lo que querías saber, y lo que ni imaginabas,
está en Yahoo! Respuestas (Beta).
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re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

At Wednesday 27/9/2006 13:51, sjdevnull@yahoo.com wrote:
Same thing with me, using Zope.
The scripting language or machinery used is an implementation detail,
so it should not appear on a URL, if you want them to be more or less
permanents.



Gabriel Genellina
Softlab SRL





__________________________________________________
Preguntá. Respondé. Descubrí.
Todo lo que querías saber, y lo que ni imaginabas,
está en Yahoo! Respuestas (Beta).
¡Probalo ya!
http://www.yahoo.com.ar/respuestas

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

Stefan Scholl wrote:Of the three people with whom I've worked who have sat on boards in the
Fortune 100, at least two of them have screwy reference semantics ;).

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

Xah Lee wrote:And not a single deletable expletive in sight. Good stuff!

regards
Steve
--
Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119
Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com
Skype: holdenweb http://holdenweb.blogspot.com
Recent Ramblings http://del.icio.us/steve.holden

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

In article <efeko0$bqg$1@mlucom4.urz.uni-halle.de>, Mirco Wahab wrote:Muskets are not shotguns.

--
Christopher Mattern

"Which one you figure tracked us?"
"The ugly one, sir."
"...Could you be more specific?"

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

Danno wrote:Compared to Python, Ruby etc. - yes.

Arne

re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

Gabriel Genellina wrote:As we all know, a "resistir" has a reactance that doesn't vary with
frequency, unlike an "inductir".

--Scott David Daniels (who couldn't resist)
scott.daniels@acm.org