Slashdot Mirror
Number of Jobs by Programming Language
The Viking writes "I was curious about which programming languages are hot with employers, so I did an informal search of several job search engines. The results are interesting (to me, at least). Are these numbers relevant? We can certainly debate whether or not the online job search engines are representative of the actual employment landscape."
forth use = if unemployed then
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
That was quick. Here's the important part (without the table tags):
Number of Job Listings by Programming Language (January 3, 2003)
monster.com hotjobs.com dice.com %
Java 2739 1000* 1957 27.82%
C++ 2103 1000* 1534 22.65%
Visual Basic 2070 969 1127 20.35%
Perl 955 517 577 10.01%
Javascript 925 455 498 9.17%
C# 290 235* 183 3.46%
Ada 384 175 57 3.01%
Fortran 124 68 48 1.17%
Scheme 39* 138* 46* 1.09%
Python 58 43 33 0.65%
Smalltalk 42 27 32 0.49%
Lisp 12 4 9 0.12%
9741 4631 6101
* hotjobs.com changes a search of "C#" to a search of "C", so I averaged monster and dice.
* hotjobs.com limits the number of results that a query can return to 1000.
* Searching on the term "scheme" may result in false positives.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I work for a computer consulting company which deals with mainly Fortune 500 companies. Java is the most requested language with VB/ASP coming in next. .NET is starting to grow and we anticipate it will continue next year. It seems to be that companies are moving from VB to .NET, not that Java developers are moving to .NET.
Where is it? PHP has become the defacto standard for developing new websites. There are certainly more PHP jobds then Python ones. It would also be interesting
to learn about employment oportunities for ppl with older skills like Cobol, Fortran, Assembler.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
If only we had some numbers on the average pay for each position, I'de be willing to bet that while Java is real popular, you would get much higher pay for fortran.
Maybe the price of the programmers is also affecting which language people are hiring for.
There's some web site somewhere that has been keeping track of this ever month (week?) over the past few years. (Sorry, I've forgotten the URL, and can't find it with Google.)
My recent experience is that, for every C++ job, there are between two and two-and-a-half Java jobs.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
I question the usefulness of this article - it seems to be a snapshot in time and it doesn't even say when these numbers were collected. It could change dramatically next week.
It would be much more interesting to see these statistics over a wide range of time. Applicability of the languages would be interesting too (ie/ what types of jobs are looking for what type of developers).
And it doesn't really detail if some languages tend to cluster (ie/ VB coders tend to have to know x as well).
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
And on-topic, I hope that Java/Oracle/Perl/Web/Unix relevant languages are popular. If only I could see the list.
Sex - Find It
Don't forget Ted Shieh's prior work tracking jobs for different programming langauges. Its more than a bit out-dated now but anything longitudinal is valuable.
Seastead this.
This isn't offtopic, it's research into the right buzzwords to get a job. Do you know even one serious programmer who can't code in any language if presented a pocket reference guide? Citing specific languages in a job search is all about buzzwords for resumes.
Gee, typical.
Lets broaden the search to languages commoningly used in minis and mainframes. Perhaps the results will be more relevant?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
This was a very unscientifically performed study. Job availability for scheme included entries such as:
Outside Sales Consultant
Perl is a scripting language too, and its up there.. it takes a bit of programming knowledge to write good scripts.
Well it is really a Pitty that Python is not Higher I would at least place it under Perl. I often use Python at work when our customer dont request a certon language and they just want the job done. I found python is a great way of getting code out fast and relitivly clean (Sometimes Java Code for me gets sloppy unless I keep in mind to keep it clean.)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Furthermore, the searcher omitted C. C is still a very popular language for embedded applications. Everybody I know around here that got hired recently got hired to write C or assembly for hubs, cell phones, TVs or printers. I program almost entirely in C for work but I program in Java for fun.
These job sites are not the way to go. I'd say a survey of recent CS grads, and people that recently got new jobs would give much different results. Even a slashdot survey saying "Which language do you use most at work?" would be better.
It h-has become a disturbing trend in recruitment circles to advertise jobs you don't actually have, in order to mine résumés for potential employer contacts. I know that this is especially common in the UK. I'd bet that less than half of these jobs are real.
Another worrying trend is that I know people who've responded to job ads, and even gone for interview, and have been told that the job doesn't exist, but that they wanted a healthy batch of résumés on file for when the economy picks up(!!)
Th-th-the best people to ask are the freelance workers, the people actually here on Slashdot. What languages are most in demand?
In the main, as a programmer myself, I find that specific, er, languages are not demanded so much. People want solutions, unh, not languages. That said, from the REAL ads I see (I'm in numerous freelance work groups), PHP and MySQL are way way way at the top of the tree, followed by Java.
mogorific carpentry experiments
...looks like the site's been slashdotted. i really am curious to know what the numbers are for QBasic.
bwahahaha!
that gorilla game kicked ass....wonder if it's been ported?
-- anthony
Also, it would be very interesting to see C and C++ both, instead of just C++. I bet there are still tons of jobs for C programers. Also, why not search for "c-sharp" along with "c#", you know, do an OR. That might make a difference. And where is objective C?
Last but not least, where are some other languages? What about...
Obviously, most aren't serious. The "real" ommisions are in bold. Please no "FoxPro is important you insensitive clod!" replies.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Seems to me its more important to know algorithms, data structures, how to implement parsers, how to optimize databases(or knowing when its better to use a custom data structure rather than a database), etc.
But the job ads almost universally ask for knowledge of the specific language. I've worked with C++, Java, VB, Perl, SQL, XML, Javascript, and others, but in my experience knowing what to do with these languages far outweighs knowing the language itself. Why don't recruiters see this?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
"I've always heard its a crappy language.. really basic (duh)"
It is.
"could explain all the crappy bug and exploit ridden software though."
Not all, but a very huge chunk of it, and that chunk is the worst of the pile. Actually every vb program ever written by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose falls in this category.
"Am I the only one that's scared because of this?"
No there are others out there.
This should be sitting next to Visual Basic as a lot of companies usually employ both interchanably nearly. I dont even see it mentioned?!
I strongly disagree with that approach.
I've picked up a working knowledge of many languages over the years but I'm not to say that I am an expert, or even proficient.
Expertise in a language implies you know the compiler and runtime environment very, very well. It also implies that you know the common pitfalls, strengths concerning the langauage and you know how to deal with them.
It's all vague "proficient", "expert", "knows". I'd say what you discribed wouldn't pass for more than "familar", ie. "familar with language x"
I am very wary of people that list 20 different languages on their resume, or suggest that they know these languages otherwise. Not that I'm in a position to make hiring decisions right now though.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
The results show the demand for people with different language skills, but gives little insight into the type of jobs that are available, or the languges that they use.
Much more interesting would be a breakdown of the different tech sectors vs languages used, although I'm guessing that most of it would be fairly obvious (Web stuff using mainly php and perl, C for embedded etc...)
From the question, it sounds like The Viking is trying to work out which language will give him the most job opportunies. My advice would be to select at least a couple of tech sectors to refine the search and then re-generate the stats. It might be that there are lots of very similar opportunities for VB programmers which The Viking would find to be boring as shit. Better to find a language with the maximal spread across different job types :)
-- Mike
Actually it's been my experience though there is a mix just like in university grads, the number of skilled coders (or most any other profession I can think of) who are self taught is greater and the average skill level is higher.
PHP is the defacto standard used by newbies and children who don't want to learn a real language like perl or Java. PHP is shit.
I think PHP has a valid niche in building throwaway code for demos. Things I've used it for include:
- extremely low cost web sites with limited functionality. A person looking to get a site on the web with a concept can build a php site and put in on a shared server for $10/mo in hosting fees.
- prototyping - some times it's necessary to put together a prototype of an idea to show to a client in a hurry.
For serious work, I agree with you.
Let's see.... He's Missing:
But, I'd say it was a nice first draft. ;-)
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C# is all the hype now and it is hot.
Similar to a few months after JAVA was released,
you can get a GOOD job according to the ads that want people with 8-10years experience with C#
If you can also say something like "I program XML in C#" then you are all set.
On a different point, the downturn in IT industry is good. This just means that hopefully only skilled people can work there and no more ex-busdrivers hacking webpages.
What would probably make the most sense is to accentuate expertise in one language with some dabbling in other languages. A lot of places, for example, will look for people that have both Java and C++. Really though what will get you the good jobs is the things beyond raw programming skill. That is:
1) Ability to interact with other humans without scaring them
2) Familiarity with standard processes for developing and documenting development
3) An ability to understand the business needs and realities that impact the code
Code monkeys are cheap and easy to come by, but people with a good head on their shoulders and a breadth of knowledge are what get the good jobs.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
That depends on the environment and what objects it exposes for scripting. There are a lot more implementations out there than you'd think:
There are doubtless other examples.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
This language is clearly the next big thing!
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Some languages are harder to pick up than others. Sure, any decent programmer given enough time can eventually pick up any new language. I seriously doubt that most programmers who are unfamiliar with perl would be comfortable being thrown into a large perl project.
Someone who is familiar with C++ shouldn't have a very hard time moving to Java or C#, but I don't think you can generalize that to all languages.
I see VB useful for three things:
a) whipping up quick, 10-minute, run-this-once-and-never-have-to-it-again programs,
b) ui prototyping, which should be the only thing its used for by professionals, and
c) getting an intro to event-driven programming. After a couple years of dabbling in VB, i found the transition to writing Windows programs in C (with the API) and C++ (with MFC)--traditionally said to be a very difficult thing to learn--practically effortless.
On the surface your arguement seems valid, here's the problem with it. Programming is a subject in itself, there are concepts, languages only implement those concepts, that's why a CS course involves learning many languages to illustrate those concepts. If you know the assembler of your target platform or platforms then you know what the code is doing beneath the surface, or more or less, that's the knowledge that helps avoid many glitches and helps improve performance, not the specific dialect you code in. Once you've spent a significant time coding in 4 or 5 structured languages you know how to code in a structured language proficiently, simply being able to comprehend what you read in your pocket reference combined with your knowledge of structured programming and the underlying platform makes you proficient. Specializing in one or two languages makes for a specialist who is a nightmare for any project because the individual cannot grasp the big picture of the programming world.
Head hunters kept me in clover for 6 years. Only the clueless work in IT as "permanent" employees.
See my response to the other critisism post. But in short, when I say serious programmer I mean one who has learned how to program (be it university or self-taught). Learning C++ does not mean you know how to program. Learning to program isn't about individual languages, it's about learning the basis of various categories of programming languages that your thinking of when you list languages to move to. As far as perl goes, having coded it myself. I think most perl projects would be better off if NOBODY was especially familiar with perl when coding them. Although perl is an interpreted code not a programming language.
Well, as somebody who writes it for money I thought I'd answer...
.NET, or C. I'd say that at about 50000 lines it starts getting very annyoing.
Yes, VB is very basic, although some quite impressive stuff can be done with it. It's perfectly possible to write enterprise management stuff with it for example. If your app only needs to be a pretty interface for a database then VB is a quite good tool for that job. However, it's got a lot of problems.
There's always important functionality missing. MS has some really incredible knack for releasing a new version of VB that adds 2 or 3 features that you'd find really useful... but still hasn't found time to add unsigned types in VB6.
Lots of working around is needed. The experts in VB learn to do tricks with undocumented functions like CopyMemory, and calling the WinAPI. There's no way in VB to make a window appear on top of all the others, for example.
It's hard to use with source control tools. CVS is quite usable though, but not perfect. Just opening a project and closing it changes files, for no good reason.
And then there's the bug from Hell that sometimes makes it forget about an OCX you included and forces you to muck with project files by hand to fix it.
But, even regardless of all that people use it. I guess it's because it's really easy to do small things with it. If you need to do a quick tool that queries a database and prints a few reports then it's almost perfect. But if you're planning anything large I'd use anything else instead. Maybe Delphi, or
Since after all, the whole point of signing up for Monster is to start getting INCREDIBLE amounts of spam. That's what happened to myself and the whole department I was in when we got laid off and we'd all signed up with Monster.
If you have a skill that qualifies you for a job that pays $100,000 a year, but all such positions are filled, do you really have a useful skill?
No one uses PHP at an enterprise level, nor is it ready to be used in such a manner.
i nd ex.jsp
(Warning, karma-killing but truthful rant ahead)
What the fsck is "enterprise level" anyhow? If that ain't a beaten buzzword, then I don't know what is (besides "XML web services").
PHP apps tend to use the database for noun modeling and state, not objects (although it can do OOP). Thus, it's "size" depends on the database, not really on PHP itself. Now if you want to define "enterprise level" to mean "big fat bloated objects/classes", then you are right. PHP is not "there". If you want big fat tangled bloated objects/classes, then go with EJB. Perfect mess for job security. See:
http://www.softwarereality.com/programming/ejb/
Relational theory and OO are pretty much at odds I have come to conclude, at least WRT to "business modeling". OO fans only want to use the "persistence" feature of relational databases. Beyond that they tend to re-invent the database from scratch in code, hand-coding their own indexes, joins, etc.
Table-ized A.I.
I can code in these: Prolog, Lisp, Scheme, ML, C, C++, Java and JSP, Basic, VB and ASP, Perl, PHP, PLSQL, Assembler 86/87, Assembler 68000 Motorolla, JavaScript, Pascal (3-7), Turin and OOT, Fortran, PL1, Cobol, JCL, various shell scripts sh, csh, ksh and I am possibly missing a few others I used. These are only languages and already there are different programming paradigms. Lisp, Prolog, C, Java, C++, Perl - do you see how these languages are different? You better know exactly why you are using one and not another for the job you are doing and you better use it right applying good programming techniques and patterns and using all available libraries and frameworks. Sure you can use C to do all of the stuff you need but if the right tool for the job is Lisp or Java your work will be hindered, your results will possibly be not as maintanable and possibly could not be proven to be correct. A programmer who is unfamiliar with a functional programming paradigm will not be able to use Scheme to his/her advantage. A programmer who is used to the procedural paradigm will not use Java or C++ or Smalltalk or Eiffel effectively because his thinking will be limited to the only paradigm he/she knows/understands.
You can't handle the truth.
Becoming a language guru will inevitably involve deeper issues anyway, as true language gurus often delve into the implementation tools (compilers, VMs) for their given language.
"Big thinkers" on the other hand, tend to be just that. Lots of talk and little action. The bottom line is that you are trying to push out code to make money.
The whole study is biased based on who happens to advertise for jobs on those boards, or on any boards at all. New jobs tend to be more for newfangled languages, whereas old jobs ... most of which are filled and not turning over, are for older languages, such as C. The funny thing is I do frequently see jobs for C programmers, either for embedded systems, or for kernel drivers, on some boards. Why there is no showing at all is curious. It may be because the jobs get listed as "C/C++" (often times form based choices lump them together incorrectly ... by someone who doesn't know the difference), and so what might be the case is that what is listed as C++ might in fact be C/C++ and therein the C jobs as well as C++ jobs. But I do not know for sure what the case really is.
Maybe if we categorize the programming jobs by application role, e.g. business logic, web, embedded, driver, systems, etc., as well as language (e.g. a 2-way table), we might get a clearer picture of what is going on. Unfortunately, most job boards do a really screwed up method of categorizing jobs.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Job openings are crammed with requirements that are not necessary. Applicant should have 5 years experience with C#.
That isn't even possible... C# didn't exist in 1998!
A lot of employers have heard that it's a "buyers market" and forgotten that their dream employee is sometimes a theoretical person who doesn't exist. Those employers who are holding out for the impossible will find themselves still short-staffed when the recovery hits, and will get lapped by a fully staffed competitor who used the slow times to train on the job.
These indivduals are at different skill, and hence, WAGE levels. You pay for talent. So you wouldn't be an employer for very long, because your strategy appears to be that wage is not an issue.
Also, if the work is tedious, your highly skilled multi-talented engineer will likely leave or become insanely bored and actually produce less.
In any case, you are vastly oversimplifying.
I agree 100% actually you've made my point exactly. And I don't know about you, but I don't consider anyone a serious programmer who doesn't make an effort to learn different paradigm rather than languages per say.
No, I'm sorry I have to agree with the guy above (as well as you). It's true that *really* knowing how how to program is more valuable on the whole than being an expert in a particular language... however, on a specific project, and with certain languages (perl is a fairly good example), prior deep experience with the specific language can make a HUGE difference.
[Just so you understand that I'm not talking out of my ass, I've been programming for 20 years, broken down for the large part (with some overlap) as about 9 C/C++, 7 FORTRAN, 5 BASIC , 4 assembly (various) and 4 Perl (plus a bunch of other pedagogical languages like scheme and so on).]
I would consider someone a hell of a lot more valuable if they had a lot of experience with several different programming languages, because, as you said above, they are more likely to understand the fundamental concepts of programming. However, I'm working in a Perl shop right now (and unlike these other posters, I DO make hiring decisions), and at this stage, I wouldn't consider anyone for a senior position who didn't have consierable experience with Perl. There are a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest ones is: 3 months to get up to speed or 6 months? Consider how much they're being paid, and the opporunity cost of 3 more months, and its just not worth it.
Perl is definitely derived from C (as well from shell and various others), but a guy with C and Java and COBOL and whatever else is just NOT gonna be able to run with Perl that quickly, period. Perl is too different in terms of the tools that you actually use (I'm not talking about syntax or silly little idioms and all of the magic variables in Perl). I mean, if you're programming in Perl, and you're not thinking "how would regular expressions and/or hash tables (for example) make this easier?" then you're probably just not doing it right (whatever "it" is). If you're really convinced that isn't how you should be using Perl for this situation, then you probably shouldn't be using Perl anyway. (I love Perl, but it's not the answer to everything).
Ugh, I'm rambling now... anyway, I'd say that what you said is *mostly* true, but almost every language has things about it that separate it and make partiular expertise valuable (in at least some situations). Hire someone to write C/C++ because they know Java, C#, Perl and Basic? But they've never used a pointer!!!! Hire someone to write Java because they've used C/C++, Fortran, and PHP? But are they really thinking about threads from the get-go? Etcetera... I hope you see my point.
:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq
One of the nice things about knowing and using a number of languages is that you get to pick the right tool for the right job. People like you, Kunta Kinte, seem to believe it's a good thing to limit tools; sometimes just because you have a hammer doesn't mean that everything should resemble a nail. Ever tried to write a compiler in FORTRAN, for example? Ever listen to an MSCE extoll the virtues of a certain company's products for every conceiveable problem?
Now, on my resume I list the "languages" LEX and YACC (lately more Flex/Bison), because I have found that applications-specific scripting languages can improve quality and make maintenance far easier than trying to do everything in, say, C. Many of the projects I work on are tools, not end-user apps, so providing a scripting language suited for the task makes it easy for my customers to concentrate on their jobs instead of how to get my software to do something they really want to do. Even when the scripting language is used exclusively internally, I have found that the quality of the resulting program is far higher because I've removed opportunities to screw up by using a level of abstraction. C++ and other object-oriented languages try to create a one-size-fits-all version of this, but sometimes it's just easier to think about the problem with a more free-form syntax without worring about inheretance issues, constructor/destructor conflicts, garbage collection, and the other baggage that seems to come with now-"traditional" OO programming.
How many environments do you work in? I'm equally at home in the embedded space, personal-computer applications, Web applications, secure e-commerce applications, network stuff, and man-rated programming. Each area has its own set of tools -- why shouldn't I mention them as I'm versed in using them?
Or perhaps you are of the school of "jack of all trades, master of none"? Sorry, I like challanges. I may be 50, but I can still write code. Maybe not as fast, but I'll stack the quality of my code against any person here.
One other powerful use of VB is as a high-level controler of ActiveX objects. When factor in that all of the major Microsoft applications expose themselves for automation via ActiveX, and in fact most of them use Visial Basic for Applications as their primary macro language, Visual Basic becomes a very powerful bridge between Microsoft products.
New poll topic! But I don't think very many would vote for Visual Basic in this site..
A few months later, in a PHB-meeting: "Apparently there's an innovative language called 'Cowboyneal' that's been very popular.."
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
I definately see your point, I even agree in general. I definately do not think you should throw a C programmer in a perl project and expect him to roll (whether or not I agree perl should be used for coding anything that could be called a "project" unless it's perl module is another matter).
As an experienced programmer, when you look at a list like this, are you thinking in terms of jumping into a job with an unfamiliar language if it's number one on the list or are you looking at which language to look more closely at and in relatively short time be able to add it to your resume.
Where we disagree I suppose is how much time it takes to pick up these things and identify them. For example with perl, it took me less than 24hrs working with it before I was asking myself "how would regular expressions and/or hash tables make this easier". When absorbing a new language the first thing I look at is syntax and basic functionality, then I start to look for the things that are unique or advantageous in that language.
Basically I guess what I'm saying is this is nothing but a list of buzzwords so you can add them to your resume (even if it does take a month to be able to honestly do it).
I think most perl projects would be better off if NOBODY was especially familiar with perl when coding them
Better spoken words I've rarely heard!
-jerdenn
Cold Fusion may be great for rapid prototyping, but it's lacking many features needed for an enterprise level service. I haven't used MX, so I don't know if this has changed, however, their security model assumes that you have one distinct set of users PER server. From what I've seen of PHP's file uploading in the past, it's not much better.
And well, from my past experience, CF's proven to be rather unreliable in an enterprise situation. [an average of one unrecoverable crash per day, in which an admin has to manually intervene to bring it back up]. I understand that CF is more stable under Windows, however, we run a Solaris shop as we don't like rebooting the entire machine on that regular of a basis.
There's plenty of test pre-processors out there that all do mostly the same thing, and you just have to balance what reliability, scalability, functionality and security are best for your purpose. I wouldn't rank ColdFusion above average on 3 of those 4 categories.
That's not to say that it doesn't serve its purpose in proof of concept, rapid prototyping, or other low usage sites, but I'd definately think about replacing it before it gets heavy usage.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I feel your pain....only 8 job listings in all of Dice for my favorite language, Ruby (probably 100's in Japan, but none in U.S.). Zero listings for Haskell (just 6 matches for a company that had "Haskell Avenue or something in address). Maybe someday I'll be lucky enough to have a job again where they only care about results, not the language used.
To decide what the best prospects for employment are you need to look at not only how many jobs there are using a particular language, but how many applicants there are for those positions. There's far more Java programmers on the market than anythings else, so that as an employer of people who write in C++, and people who write in Java, I find I can fill the Java position far more quickly.
Also, a lot of the application space covered by Java competes with the application space covered by Visual Basic rather than that covered by C or C++. That is, Java is being used for pretty end-user stuff, particularly if it's web based or an in-house project, whereas you use C or C++ for applications that require high performance (and these applications do still exist), and for shrink-wrapped software deloyed widely. There is some overlap, and some other things I haven't taken into account here.
Java is not necessarily used for platform independence. In fact even remaining on the same platform you have to special case things for different versions of the JVM, unless you have control of that, which you probably don't.
So, the questions are:
I find it very surprising that there are no jobs listed at all for C programmers. Is he perhaps lumping C and C++ into one category?
And the brethren went away edified.
Using the keword search query formatU AGE
http://jobsearch.monster.com/jobsearch.asp?q=LANG
gets a more acurate number, but still limits the count to a maximum of 5000, for example
Java = More than 5000
C++ = More than 5000
You even can count C# by using this link.
C# = 446
Mostly the latter. It's a trend. I'm waiting to see if anyone catches on. Knowing the (balls) mentality of most Slashdot contributors, everyone will be going 'In S-S-SOVIET RU-RU-RUSSIA' within days. Or not :-D
Besides, Slashdot needs some new trends. Soviet Russia is way (clitoris) past its prime now, and hot grits, Natalie Portman, PROFIT!!, and Beowulf Clusters are truly dead and buried. See my sig.
Another trend is throwing random porn related words into otherwise insightful posts and seeing if you still (cock) get moderated up.
mogorific carpentry experiments
For example, bank jobs or old school automotive would need cobol background...
While a new fangled web-startup might want PHP..
But i cant read the page to see what they have to say if they take this into account or not..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The only thing that really surprised me was the javascript rank. Other than that I probably would have guessed the top ranking ones.
I think now that Java isn't as slow as it used to be, it's really catching on. I personally prefer it to C++ because it's typically a lot cleaner. (In my opinion)
-Chris
I really miss Delphi/Pascal/Kylix !?!?!? This list is far from complete since these languages are used a lot in rapid development....
Spelling errors were made for your amusement only...
This is a common argument, and there is obviously some element of truth to it, but it's still flawed for two big reasons.
If you think you can take a Java programmer, even one with several years of experience, and get him to program industrial strength C++ with a good book and a couple of weeks of on-the-job practice, I think you're mistaken. He'll write code that compiles, but it won't use the RAII idiom to avoid resource leaks, base classes won't have empty virtual destructors, large class hierarchies won't be divided into a sensible arrangement of files resulting in hideous dependencies at build times, he'll pass random boolean parameters to functions where enumerations are appropriate, etc.
Similarly, you try taking a guy who's used to C and getting him to write functional code using high-level functions, currying and lazy evaluation. The mindset just isn't there, and takes time to develop, not a copy of Learn This Fab Language In 30 Seconds.
The experience issue just isn't as straightforward as some (mostly theoretical, with a heavy CS background) people make out. Experience with general programming technique is very important, but experience with the actual tools still counts for a lot, too.
And before anyone flames, be aware that I'm a professional developer with experience using several diverse languages, and a CS qualification from a well-regarded university, so I don't have any axe to grind against CS here.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I like when employers ask for "10 years experience in C#" when the language hasn't been around that long.
> Programming is a subject in itself, there are concepts, languages
> only implement those concepts
Indeed, and different langauges, in the process of implementing the
various concepts in different ways, emphasise and teach different
concepts with varying degrees of effectiveness. When I took a class
in Pascal in high school, it revolutionised the way I wrote BASIC.
Then I got to college and took other languages. ForTran, QBasic
(yes, they had a class in that), Visual Basic, C++ -- none of these
languages really made fundamental changes to the way I thought about
programming, but each of them did teach me something. After Pascal,
the next language that did completely change my thinking was Inform;
in my spare time I read through the Inform Designer's Manual and
messed around with Inform, which taught me far more about object
oriented design than any amount of C++ ever could have done. After
I graduated, I continued to learn yet more languages. Emacs lisp
once _again_ revolutionised my programming, as did Perl. Since
Perl I've played with a handful of languages, including Python and
Javascript. No, not every one of these languages makes me a better
programmer, but _some_ of them have. The influences of Inform and
lisp are still with me when I program in Perl.
So while my resume doesn't claim that I'm fluent in 20 languages,
it does say that I've had worked somewhat with a number of them,
and then specifies the specific ones I'm most comfortable with.
(Not that it probably matters; I'm not really trying to get work
as a programmer per se.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Where I work pretty much the whole IT department uses Java. It is very, very widespread at an enterprise level... some of the things you mentioned are also used internally but generallly will not make it out to job requirement space.
The need for Lex/Yacc has been all but eliminated by the coming of XML. No longer do you need to build a custom parser on a project, you simply use XML instead and grab whatever parser suits you best (usually Xalan). I used to do all sorts of things with Yacc and haven't touched it for years now.
Awk/Bash would just come in under general UNIX knowledge, so you'd probably only enounter the phrase "X years of UNIX" or perhaps "UNIX scripting" in a job description.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With all those Monster and Dice, I thought you were trying to write some kind of Role Playing Character Card joke. You know, something like:
Cobol (Dwarf)
CSharp (Elf)
Java (Hutt)
Perl (Squid Troll)
RPG (Ent)
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
The people posting the jobs are insane, incompentent, idiotic or all of the above.
Favorite post:
Must have Exchange 2000 on Solaris 8.
This
Ever occured to you that perhaps the language(s) used are part and parcel of the results? If you write your code in Haskell, and I write it in Java, assuming identical end functionality and other end-user quality metrics, which is better? The Java codebase. Why? Maintenance. It is *really* dumb from a business perspective to depend on any one person being in any one position. If the Haskell-codebase's maintainer died, quit, got sick for six months, shaved his/her head and became a Hare Krishna dropout, where does this leave the company? Searching desperately for a Haskell programmer, which may take a long time given that the number of really good Haskell developers is epsilon small compared to, say, the number of really good Java developers. [I'm using Haskell and Java as comparative examples here, you can sub in any(rare|common) couplet of languages you want.]
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
PHP 189 224 31 2.12%
Which would put it somewhere between Fortran and Ada.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
You should quickly share your insights with the folks over at Yahoo!
Yahoo is doing some very strange things. They evaluated a bunch of web development technologies, decided J2EE was the best, and then chose to use PHP because FreeBSD has very bad support for threads.
Now to me that is putting the cart before the horse. First you choose what software you want to run, then you choose the platform you run it on.
jobs by OS on dice: Windows 2229 Solaris 685 Linux 399 AIX 367 AS/400 or OS/400 287 HP/UX 191 Novell 165 VMS 61 Mac or MacOS or System 7 58 RTOS 58 VM 31 IRIX 18 BSD 18 OS/2 13 SCO 8 Darwin 6 BeOS 0 CHORUS 0 MINIX 0 HURD 0
Java is just the buzzword that almost all IT managers think that their applicants should have.
I have seen dozens of job postings for positions like System Administrator and Database Administrator that had NOTHING to do with Java, and yet, somehow, Java finds its way onto the list of requirements. I've seen several of my managers post job openings requesting Java experience while our department did absolutely no Java work whatsoever.
And, right there, you have an explanation of why most software teams fail, most commercial software products suck, and so many people keep buying junk development tools: software teams in industry don't have a clue what they are doing. They are just plugging together a bunch of library routines. They don't know whether to use quicksort or mergesort. They are mystified by what a garbage collector does and how to tune code to perform well. They have no clue what happens when they write "new object". TCP/IP might as well be ESP.
Thank you for demonstrating this point so clearly for us all. PS: Would you mind telling us where you work, as a warning?
oh yes, I know that for more than 99.999999% of the time that is the case. But I once had a job in manufacturing world where one-time data conversions were done from disparate sources into CADD models....and different languages or software tools were the best one in each case...and the stuff NEVER used again, and the original data source compared manually against CADD model at the end, so no one even wanted to see or save or hear about the code.
It's much faster at making me money :-)
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Probably all the morons who have overtaken this site for a while now.
Wanna mod me down? Go ahead asshole!
Right, but the buzzwords land the interview. The experience section of a resume and the interview ought to cover the details. As an interviewer, you obviously would ask about all those twenty listed languages, and in the process would probably discover a lot. To leave the buzzwords and the even vague descriptive phrases off a resume is dumb.
must... stay... awake...
Yeh and 'Cowboyneal' would turn up on Monster next week since all the recruiters would start asking for it just to have resumes on hand. It would probably rank right between Dog# and C#.
PHP is a very flexible and powerful language -- very useful for developing applications that need to be easily modifiable, debuggable and portable.
I agree with that in general (I do find Java debuggers to be significantly better than what is available for PHP, primarily due to the strong IDEs available for Java). However if your throw in maintainable and scalable I start to have real problems with PHP. That's why I said I like it for prototypes etc.
About 6 months ago my boss asked me to research the use of PHP on larger scale web sites, i.e. more than two servers for a single application. I went to sites like PHP.net, zend,com, etc. and found no such examples. And in fact some of the examples on these sites turned out to be places that had switched to Java since the example was posted. Now maybe these sites were out of date, but....
I cannot discuss them due to NDA restrictions
Makes it kind of hard to evaluate what you are saying. In any case I would have to say that I think the current leading edge UI technology is Flash MX using Flash Remoting to either ASP.NET or J2EE. And this is something that isn't supported by PHP at all.
Now to me that is putting the cart before the horse. First you choose what software you want to run, then you choose the platform you run it on.
They've already got a cart AND horse and it's been moving along for years.
Yeah, Java could handle what they need as well, theoretically. In the real world, they already have *thousands* of machines running FreeBSD. Scrapping all of those to move to new hardware and OS just to THEN be able to port everything to Java is extremely costly, both hardware-wise and time-wise. The cost differential must not have been enough to counteract whatever supposed deficincies some people think PHP may have.
If they're really serious about Java, then can migrate things to PHP, then move those processes over to other platforms (on which Java will perform better) then migrate things to Java. Even if that go that route for some sections, it'll be years before it's complete.
So, Java is great in theory but when push comes to shove, PHP is the one which is getting the job done.
creation science book
You missed my point entirely.
I am not saying one shouldn't learn as many languages as they can. We should. Neither am I saying you should use one tool for all situations. Obviously not.
My point was to be careful how you classify your knowledge.
Lots of people to to come off as an Java expert because they 'did a class'. When I did compiler theory class and we each wrote a compiler, from scratch, with the lexer and parser written in Flex and Bison. Does that make me an expert in Flex/Bison? Don't think so. That qualifies as familiar in my view, even together with a few other encounters in miscellaneous projects.
How many environments do you work in? I'm equally at home in the embedded space, personal-computer applications, Web applications, secure e-commerce applications, network stuff, and man-rated programming. Each area has its own set of tools -- why shouldn't I mention them as I'm versed in using them?
My guess is, unless you are in the top 10 percentile of programmers out there, I'd say you can easily shave a few of those off. Geeks often have an overly rosey view of themselves.
But that's just my guess. I don't know you.
PS. Try not to take my view as a personal attack. It's just an opinion.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
public static final int X_00 = 0;
public static final int X_01 = 1;
...
public static final int X_FF = 255;
I asked him what was up with that. His reply? "Java doesn't have hex support built in." My reply: "Uhm, yeah it does. Always did, in fact." His reply: "Oh, well, I never found it."
Knowledge of the language and its libraries are extremely important.
Scrapping all of those to move to new hardware and OS just to THEN be able to port everything to Java is extremely costly, both hardware-wise and time-wise.
They are going to have to port everything anyway - their custom development environment is being scrapped. And where do you see evidence they need new hardware? And committing to FreeBSD? It seems to me that there are other platforms that are having a LOT more developer resources thrown at them. Will FreeBSD even be sustainable for a large enterprise 3-5 years from now?
I think that they are making a decision that is going to hurt bad when it bites them in the ass.
And where do you see evidence they need new hardware?
They can't run Java on existing machines due to OS. Assumption on my part - I'd thought I'd read that they'd need to upgrade hardware to move to Java. I assume they *could* just change OS to run Java instead (Linux on same hardware? Or Solaris?).
The long and short is that at this time they have no cost-effective way to move to anything else except that which can run on their existing FreeBSD systems - PHP fit the bill better than Java or pretty much anything else given their constraints.
Is it the *best* way to go? Long term you may think not, but I tend to think it'll be fine for them. They've always seemed to be much more technology agnostic, and certainly got pretty far without any big name app servers behind them over the past 6-7 years.
creation science book
C++ provides:
- a string class that's far more resistant to buffer overflows than char*s;
- powerful data structure mechanisms (built in variable sized arrays and linked lists you no longer have to code yourself, plus sets and associative arrays likely better than you'd throw together),
- lots of help with memory management,
- and good ways of abstracting data (and operations) so the design is fairly well communicated by the code itself.
These can all be big productivity boosts.C++ does not prevent you from doing so. But if you want to do something other than pass around function pointers, there's no way to do so in C that clearly expresses your intent. There are several ways to do so in C++, not even counting inheritance.You think inheritance is a fatal disease for software? Fine; don't use it. Don't define a single member as virtual or protected, and it'll be pretty tough for anyone to usefully inherit from your classes.
That's an admission of your ignorance, not a valid criticism of the language.Can it all be done in C? Sure. Can it be done in assembler? Of course. Can it be done in C++, with less effort, and in a way that better communicates the programmer's intention? In my experience, absolutely.
People and projects sometimes stumble when moving from C to C++ ... or when adopting any new technology. There are strategies that often work, and others that always fail. Want to talk about them?
I've read what you've said (here and elsewhere) about C++. You don't see how it can give programmers an advantage. Okay; but then you attack it as if no one should use it, rather than as if you tried to use it and failed. (Honest, there's a tone of aggressive defensiveness in your postings that makes your position come across as more emotional than rational. That tone seriously undermines your arguments.)
No one's going to force you to program in C++; but no one's going to force managers to hire you for projects using C++. You won't succeed in getting others to be restricted by your limitations. Your choice, your consequences.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
HR people often don't know what they're really writing in job ads. Especially in bigger companies (i.e. big enough to have an HR bureaucracy that doesn't actually know the products or the engineers, which seems to happen when Silicon Valley startups reach 200 people, which is also when the HR professionals start saying things like "No, you've got to stop the Friday afternoon beer, that's politically incorrect and exposes us to liability for drunk drivers"), managers trying to hire employees and potential employees trying to find jobs that match their skills have to start working around them. I remember seeing job ads looking for people with 5 years of Java experience early in the boom, back when there was really only one person who could say that he had that much (James Gosling of Sun, the inventor of Java, who wasn't particularly looking for a journeyman programmer job right then...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Search engine searches don't give very good stats. For examples: Many search engines won't search for the # in C#, the ++ in C++; Ada is sometimes a language, sometimes requirements for accessibility for disabled people; most jobs that make dice or Monster are posted multiple times by multiple headhunters. The biggest employers are connected to the greatest number of headhunters and have their positions, using the most mainstream (ie MS) technologies, most widely reposted. Many job postings list languages that are not really part of the job. A large percentage of current postings for Pascal, Delphi, Ada, Cobol, Smalltalk, PL1, Fortran and other formerly popular languages are really for postings for jobs re-implementing systems from such languages into other now hotter languages.
Taking Japan by storm, anyway.....too bad not here
I used RPG II for a summer job back in college on an IBM System 34 (yes, that was before many of you were born :-) It had 48K of Semiconductor RAM (not core!) and a 13MB disk drive, and the Apple 2 could kick its butt a couple years later, and RPG was a terribly limiting language to program in, mainly tolerable for the accounting applications that we worked on which were simple accumulate-subtotal-print nested loops. If the machine had had a BASIC interpreter, it would have been much more effective, but it didn't. My father knew a number of people doing chemical system simulations in RPG, which they were doing because they ran on hardware that was affordable by individual departments, somewhat like PDP-8s. But that was then, and even by five years later, there was really no excuse for doing new RPGs.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Amen to all of this. VB is a great tool to quickly show someone something that doesn't work.
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
What about the fact that almost all job listings these days will mention more than one of these skills? There are significantly less jobs than what this chart shows because of that fact, not counting the "spam" jobs. It seems that more often than not any Java post also mentions C or C# these days...
Required knowledge and experience with the following: Java, JSPs, EJBs, JavaScript, ASPs, VBScript, C/C++, HTML, XML, WebSphere Application Server, UNIX (AIX) platform, Windows 2000/NT platform.
Alright, there must be a ton of people out there with these credentials, especially all that Java plus VBScript. I can think of only one person that I know that maybe has these. Read on:
Preferred knowledge and experience with the following: OOA&D, UML, Together/J, Visual Age for Java, Visual Age for C++, DB2/UDB, MQ Series, MS SQL server, Perl and other scripting languages, Interwoven Teamsite. 5-8 years web application development or support in either UNIX or Windows platforms. Bachelor's degree in computer sciences, business or engineering.
Damn, job's written for me!
Seriously, who's got these credentials? And if you do, why are you still at the same job? Or are you consulting by now?
And if you don't have all the required skills, do you apply anyway?
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
Taking Japan by storm, anyway.....too bad not here
Yeah, here in the US I wouldn't exactly say that Ruby is taking the country by storm, but it does seem to be making steady progress. It would be nice if it were going a bit faster...
The C preprocessor isn't Turing-complete. Try and write the following code in C:
... Free hint: it optimizes for an O(1) execution time, at the price of an ungodly compile time. Template metaprogramming rocks. And you can't do it in C. :)
=====
#include <iostream>
template <unsigned long n>
struct factorial
{
const static unsigned long value = n * factorial::value;
};
template <>
struct factorial<0>
{
const static unsigned long value = 1;
};
int main(void)
{
using namespace std;
cout << "10! = " << factorial<10>::value << endl;
return 0;
}
=====
Gah. Damn < anglebrackets. The first struct should be
template <unsigned long n>
struct factorial
{
const static unsigned long value = n * factorial<(n-1)>::value;
};
you can get a GOOD job according to the ads that want people with 8-10years experience with C#
Well, let's see... C# has been around what, a couple of years now. Maybe three. So maybe this is the solution to the job shortage: four of us with 2 years of C# experience could apply for one job that requires 8 years of C# experience claiming that together we have 8 years of combined experience with C#... or even better, 16 of us with six months experience could apply. Wow, this is a real job creator!
...Seen it done in C++ too. Made me cry. The only good part of the whole thing was that it was code I was picking up from a guy who had "sadly left the team", as it were.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Problem is, no CS graduates do know this.
Absolute hogwash. I've been in this business for 20 years and interviewed developers for probably 100 openings. When I see no formal computer science education I put that resume on the bottom of the pile. Not all entry-level CS majors are ready to hit the ground running but at least you know that they have been exposed to a broad range of programming and software engineering topics. And in my experience, it's the physics and EE folks that I have had the most problems with.
I believe the biggest problem in our industry today is bad IS management. In my experience, IS managers without formal CS education are the reason that IS fails to meet business expectations. And I sense a lot of 'tude from the poster...probably does not have a CS degree and wants to get back at those who do.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
This has got to be a joke. Someone types in "java" or "scheme" in monster and tries to play it off as some sort of indication of the ratio of jobs out there? I am suprised so many people are taking this survey so seriously and arguing over it. The probability for inaccuracy is probably .. hehe .. off the chart err pie chart. Large numbers of jobs are not listed on job sites, not to mention the languages this person leaves out ... C as someone mentioned, cobol, peoplcode(although it could be debated whether its really a language, there are jobs out there) .. and I'd imagine a huge number of languages I've never heard of.
Granted the person who wrote it goes over some of the problems with the study, I somehow feel it was presented and taken a little bit too seriously.
My repetoire is similar to yours, but I can't
consider my skills current in any but the 5 or 6
languages that I've been using in the past
couple of years, whatever they happen to be at
the time.
While the ability to recognize
when a certain model or paradigm is appropriate is
very useful, it's almost never right to use the
corresponding language, for several reasons.
Among these are:
- Maintainability. You might be happy to use
Prolog, Haskell, C++ and Java in a single app,
but pity the manager who has to hire your
replacement.
- Evironment. No matter how well an Apache app
could exploit generators and co-routines, I'm not
going to be writing it in Icon. Nor will I be
writing thin client interfaces in Common Lisp.
In almost every real world situation, the practical
aspects of engineering process and business
requirements will preclude using the Right Tool
For The Job.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
You're argument is broke.
Given sets A and B where A is a superset of B, we know: if b is an element in B then b is also an element in A. Or, in other words, all b's in B are also in A. Any element a in A, may or may not be in B.
But, following this logic, all we would have is that "All C coders are C++ coders.", not "All C++ coders are C coders."
But even when the statement is written that way, it still doesn't really work in practice. Sure you *could* be a C-only coder and code using a C++ compiler--but you wouldn't like it. Besides, what would be the point of using a C++ compiler with all its complexity if you're only writing C code? Finally, how could you claim to be a C++ coder if you didn't know what a class was?
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Ouch! my other favorite language!
Oh well, guess I'll continue to make my living with half-assed designed-by-Rube-Goldberg-character-on-crack languages like Java, Perl and C++....and even COBOL sometimes. In the immortal words of Bill the Cat, "Aaacckkpfpfpth! Bleck!"
Thanks for the heads up, I'll add that to the "oh, yes it is" list the next time somebody tries to claim that JS isn't good for anything other than image rollovers.
(Heads off to TrollTech's site to see what's up with QtScript...)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I'm currently an RIT student and the IT majors are being taught Java (2 years ago it was VB) while the CS majors are being taught C++. I find it interesting that, according to this guys results, Java is more sought after then C++ Luckily, anyone who knows C++ also *generally* knows Java
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
The old Citran, Joss, Cal, or whatever time-sharing interpreted language was written in Fortran. (About 5k lines of Fortran II, I think) It was much better than its competitors of the day, ie Basic and Xtran.
Then, for the real fans of serious programmer cajones, consider this: Realia wrote their COBOL compiler in Realia COBOL, which was a take-no-prisoners, unmitigated, unextended, minimum standard COBOL, ie 1974 version more or less.
I'm also suspicious that C# makes #6. Does anyone know anybody using it? I tend to think it's gotten that position because of its visibility being associated with MS and therefore has become known to people writing and contributing to job listings.
I could be way off-base here, but that's my initial feeling about this.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
I agree with you. And let's take this one step further...
While we're all forced to play "keyword bingo" on our resumes because of the keyword driven searches that companies will use to attempt to find qualified IT personnel, what's really going to matter when you hit the job interview is what you bring to the table for that employer. In other words, if you have specific and valuable experience within a given industry (e.g. geological survey, financial services, etc.), then you're going to have a much better chance than the next guy over who "just knows Perl/VB/whatever".
I think people should pay attention to the technologies too, but I really think you'll be doing yourself a tremendous favor by learning about and concentrating on a given industry. It's the ultimate compliment to not only pander to your customers' needs, but their interests too.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Read the comment under the graph -- they pointed out that "scheme" frequently turns up false hits.
Nothing too surprising. Lightweight stuff is done in Java, high load stuff in C++, stuff with a short turnaround time in perl. A large amount of stuff is inexplicably done in Visual Basic, but that's always been true.
I guess I'm a little surprised that Ada is so high, but maybe that's Office of Homeland Security-type stuff contracts. I can't think of another reason for the government to be suddenly doing development.
May we never see th
New programming languages have gained substantial market share quickly, which is not what anyone would have expected new languages to do, given the prominence of C and oncoming rush of C++ about ten years ago. I suppose that means that software is now a fashion industry, subject to sweeping and sudden changes of fashion. Both Java and C# have been very successful. It's now Java, C#, VB, and everything else. A year ago it was VB, C++, Java, and everything else. Most of the lesser languages (not in the top 4) are losing share very quickly. They will hang on in some places, but market share is withering, support will be not easily available, demise follows, etc. For examples, it looks like perl and python have peaked; Powerbuilder, tcl and smalltalk are disappearing; Ada, Eiffel, modula-anything, Fortran, and COBOL are fading back into the triassic period. Two languages, Delphi and SAS, although they have very small market share, seem to be bucking the trend by holding on to what share they have very well.
That last one bothers me a lot. It means you *have to* become part of the problem in order to get noticed. Being honest on your resume means not getting any calls. Employers assume you are exaggerating whether you are or not, so if you don't exaggerate they picture you being a lot less qualified than you are. At least that's the way it seemed the last time I was looking to change jobs, which admittedly was over six years ago so things may have changed.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I prefer to say that I've *forgotten* most programming languages I've ever used, but give me a week to get back up to speed on any of them and I'll be fine ;)
... the list goes on. I've worked with a multitude of languages in my professional career, and a lot of them I don't even remember I've used. I certainly wouldn't bother putting things like "makefiles" in a resume.
;)
... there tend to be more jobs searching for "Java" and "C/C++", etc for a couple of reasons. Most of them have to do with which terms HR and recruiters are familiar with. In particular, recruiters tend to maintain an internal database independently of what is actually advertised. If your resume matches any of those terms (e.g. Java, Visual Basic, etc) you will be put forward for *any* programming job. Yes, there are some recruiters who are more scrupulous about doing their job, but most aren't. HR knows this is how recruiters work, and so they tailor their requirements to match.
As a general estimate, I probably use about 5-10 programming and scripting languages at any particular time. For example, at the moment it's Python, C, C++, VBScript, DOS batch, bash shell scripts, makefiles, and I'm probably missing a couple. Within the last 6 months I've also used Java, (Transact) SQL and PHP. Different tools for different tasks.
In my life I would estimate that I've used over 50 languages, but most of them aren't current (but see my first statement). I started with Logo; moved onto BASIC; spent a year or two on Pascal. Moving into university I started with things like Modula-2, C, C++, Lisp, Prolog, a couple of assemblers (including one I wrote myself for a Nova II simulator we wrote for my final-year project)
And I'm not quite 30
Getting back to the meat of the article
While I was contracting it was rare to go to an interview and not be told "actually, we need this, this and this, but no one puts that on their resume so we can't put it in the requirements".
It's a vicious circle.
At least he didn't mention c0b01.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
I don't think I've ever worked in a company that uses only one language for everything, anyway. More to the point, none of the developers I've ever met have been one-horse wonders, either. And no surprise: to be a developer is to know how to *program*, which is a language-independent ability. We use all combinations of C, java, PHP, Tcl, and C# - and I was mildly pleased when one of the developers said he understood the point of s-expressions too, to say nothing of me being the in-office Ruby and Perl guy.
And never mind the linguistic inaccuracies (why didn't the author check each occurrence of `scheme' by hand?!) but what about jobs that are really vapourware to capture more CVs than the competing agencies? Don't they target the big names (VB, VC) more than anything else?
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
I had CoBOL, but I won't claim that it taught me much.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
SkillMarket
Software Wars
These seem to be quite percise results for the american 'market' of PLs. For instance: No way would VB and ADA get such results in Europe
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
>On the surface your arguement seems valid, here's
>the problem with it. Programming is a subject in
>itself, there are concepts, languages only
>implement those concepts, that's why a CS course
>involves learning many languages to illustrate
>those concepts.
I agree. For example, there isn't alot of difference between Visual Basic and VB.net. Or ASP and VBA for that matter. You read, you process and you write; the syntax usually changes very little. Yet, you can have years of experience programming in Visual Basic but they wont hire you for VB.net for nothing.
I think I'm gonna take me one of those Dale Carnegie courses... maybe I'll learn to lie or something.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
No, perl is the de facto standard used by newbies and children who don't want to learn a real language. Anybody who offers perl as an example of a real language doesn't know shit. It's awk with extra cruft.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
www.horde.org
BTW, I am mostly programming in Perl.
:wq
> What would a Beowolf cluster of Jesuses do in Soviet Russia,
> where all your base are belong to us?
Pour a LOT of hot borscht down Natalie Portman's pants?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I'm not a CS. I have a postgrad diploma in CS, but my first degree is in a different subject, and my professional career is real world development not academic theory. I simply mentioned the CS qualification to show that I do see value in CS and wasn't having a dig at it or those who choose to study it.
I confess, I don't understand your point. It seems like saying that hammers and pliers are only limited tools, so we should just think in terms of what we can do with our hands.
Your responses to my specific points, unfortunately, don't actually address the problems, either.
Looking through the libraries is not sufficient. Not knowing these will slow development down, but not knowing the "best practice" idioms of a language will frequently result in a buggy or poorly performing product.
And no, there aren't that many common paradigms, but I get really tired of seeing C++ programmers who write pure OO code then thinking they can write a good app in C because the syntax is much the same, even if they have no idea how to do functional decomposition effectively because they've never modelled using it before.
Perhaps. But then again, for developing real world solutions to real world problems, that's about the most important thing, possibly the only important thing for many people. Everything else is just an application of whatever algorithms are useful in your particular problem domain. What did you think CS was about?
I'm going to be charitable, and assume that your post wasn't just some strange effort to slag off CS while claiming that CA gives you L337 Sk1llz. I don't really see your point either way, though.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
They've always seemed to be much more technology agnostic, and certainly got pretty far without any big name app servers behind them over the past 6-7 years.
I am not sure that Yahoo's commitment to FreeBSD is 'technology agnostic'. It seems to me more like they have some powerful internal political forces that are pushing them in this direction.
Many of the early internet companies like Yahoo put together their own custom development systems. Amazon and EBay are two other examples I'm aware of. As the internet matured, the costs to maintain these custom systems have gotten out of hand and these companies have switched to third party app servers. Both Amazon and EBay have moved to or are moving to Java.
Although I haven't used the latest version of PHP (sorry, don't do web development these days, mostly system and database administration), but it would upload all files into one directory, and then move the files into the directory that you requested.
So, if you have multiple users with access to the system, they have to make sure that they don't ever have a file uploading at the same time with the same name, even if it's being written to a different directory. [Because, well, it was intended for a single user to be used, not a multiuser system]. In my environment (a university), this model just isn't sound. It may work for a long time, but it'll be a bitch to debug when it finally does happen.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
The installed JDK is 85 Mbytes; that's what you need for development, which is what we are actually talking about here. The installed JRE is 56 Mbytes.
Java has become ridiculously bloated.
Correction noted. It still says January 3 so it isn't automatically generated though.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
You will notice that the search query he uses to look for java programming positions excludes javascript ("Java AND NOT Javascript") which sounds ok at first, cause he wants to seperate html & javascript positions from java positions. The issue comes up with what I would imagine are a decent number of Java related jobs...something that requires Java -AND- Javascript. So any jobs that are doing web development of Applets might ask for javascript too. Just one other reason to inflate the Java numbers in your head when looking at these comparisons.
I think people should list examples of most favoured/complex/interesting/noteworthy programs they wrote in each of the languages they say they know.
:).
That'll be more helpful eh?
If I see 20 languages with no details I'm tempted to think Hello World level for at least half of them.
Then again if someone has a single Hello World source which runs in 20 rather different languages... Now that's different
Just ask them about noteworthy programs they have written in each of the languages they say they know.
;).
Then also ask about programs they have modified/hacked in interesting ways.
I've managed to usefully modify many programs even though I wouldn't claim to be proficient in the language they were written in. Even done a few things vendors said couldn't be done. And fixed a few bugs they hadn't fixed yet. Often you don't even need to know what language the source was, coz the binary is what you hack.
Yah shouldn't do this often - imagine the documentation or worse - the ISO9002... nah it never happened, just someone's imagination
" However, a "serious C programmer" told to write something in Perl will (initally) write drastically different code than a seasoned Perl programmer"
Have you ever tried to read the code output of seasoned perl programmers? Being proficient with regex's and hashes is one thing. But beyond that it's generally a bad thing.
Remember, your pocket reference contains all the information your "learning perl" book will, every bit of it, it just contains it in condensed form and actually covers more.
"But those are all different programming paradigms. A knoweldgeable manager know that, but HR keyword scanners don't."
The only point I'm really trying to make is that this is what the article is about, what buzzwords to put on your resume because you expect it to be read by that HR keyword scanner.
Let him do what he does best and make 500M/year.
:).
I'll just help sysadmin his home network for 0.1%. Not greedy
I might even help carry his golf clubs/bag.
Don't forget those apps that companies are still happily running on dumb terminals.
;).
If a company today wants those sort of apps, web versions could make great sense. A Walmart PC is probably cheaper than a classic dumb terminal
HTTP/HTTPS can allow you a great deal of network flexibility.
yeah, that does sound like perl being used the right way. Perl is always a champ when you need something Quick, Dirty, Flexible, and involving lots of string manipulation.
;)
Have you ever considered branding? Just get ya an "L" iron for those lisp clingers. Whenever what he codes starts looking too much like lisp brand him with an "L" when it happens again, brand him somewhere else. I suspect he'll learn very quickly and if he doesn't at least the next person who is about to hire him for a perl project will see the charred "L" on his forehead and know not to hire him
Take a look again: perl beat php in most of their benchmarks. And they even said they had legacy perl code.
c on 2002.htm
YSP = yahoo server pages = mod_perl
http://public.yahoo.com/~radwin/talks/yahoo-php
As for perl's lack of maintainability. How is php much better??? Even they said PHP requires discipline.
Given the results, WHY PHP?
Very strange indeed. Decision decided before test and results?
Showing the wrong test? e.g. they used a different test (coder availability etc) for the decision?
I'm not a Java coder, but my ex-colleagues didn't seem to know Java that well.
They had difficulty finding a neat way of getting the number of rows returned from an SQL select. They could get the number of columns easily, but erm, most times you know that already.
Another one had problems getting Java web libraries to not strip cookies returned from his server's http connections to other webservers.
You any idea how they should be doing these things? They must be missing something right?? Coz they resorted to doing yucky things - in my opinion anyway.
One of my best clients has had only requests for PHP/Linux/MySql based solutions.
LAMP is a worthy technology suite for some applications - however I would much rather work with Poostgresql-Linux-Apache-Tomcat-Eclipse, (PLATE) as a starting point. Then if the customer's business grows you are in a good position to move up to heavier duty solutions.
Programmer A: worth $1,000 a month for 6 months (while learning). worth $8,000 after 6 months.
Programmer B: worth $1,000 a month for 3 months (has prior experience, so shorter learning curve), then worth $6,000 after that.
If both programmers are paid the same (say, $5,000 a month), the total worth of programmer A to you will surpass programmer B at some point. Programmer A is somebody with the "x-factor" but no specific experience in your area. Programmer B is a mediocre programmer, worth slightly more than he is paid.
Put another way, who is more likely to be the one to find that showstopper bug, which allows you to actually ship? How much is that worth?
Ahem. SourceForge.net (supporting > 500,000 users) is written in PHP (+ Perl and Python).
I could say something snotty like "so that's why it performs so poorly?". Seriously though, SourceForge is not the most reliable web site that I've ever visited. I don't know enough about their issues to say what the cause of the problems are, but they do have problems.
If they are using a mixed code base of Perl, Python and PHP I feel very sorry for them. I used to have to support an e-commerce site that was mixed Perl/PHP and I found that it was a nightmare - logic duplicated all over the place in two different languages. Very, very bad.
Fair statement. Many of the general-purpose scripting tools are "c-like", such as PERL, BASH, and even a little JAVA now and then.
For one project, though, the "scripting language" I created was a pure rules-based language system. Another scripting language I created for a project was characterized by a colleague as "looking like DNA descriptions" in creating a series of numeric-control sequences. One scripting language was a direct rip-off of OS/360 Assembler's MACRO facility, because it was the best tool for the job and the audience -- banks.
By the way, LEX and YACC are not C tools. They are language processing tools, with most people emitting C code as the actions of expressions and productions. The underpinnings of Unix implementations of LEX and YACC *are* written in and for C, but that wouldn't stop someone from taking the same language and porting the utilities to target code in COBOL, FORTRAN, ALGOL, or PL/I. Or even LISP. Don't confuse implementation with design.
Ever think how to design a scripting language to provide metadata to generate control files for BIND? I'm working on one in my spare time because I want better automation of DNS management. I know people who use Excel for the purpose, and it sort of works. A scripting language, married to make, would mean that I make a single change to a script file and let the whole thing rip.
I wrote one scripting language to generate random text corpus files for studies of text compression in analog modems. This was BNF-like, but includes elements to indicate liklihood of generation percentages so the generate corpus would have characteristics similar to those in real text. My goal was to come up with near-random text that would have the same compression characteristics as real text in the same language (English, French, Russian, and Italian were the target languages).
I use what works for the job at hand. Free-form syntax (like C, PL/I, ALGOL). Strict line organization (assembler, FORTRAN). Even column-based (RPG, Autocoder).
You mean you didn't look? My resume is posted on-line, after all, and even at the URL shown here on SlashDot.
Actually, I don't. "Programming languages: extensive experience in Assembler, C, LEX, HTML, PASCAL, PERL, PHP, PL/I, regular text expressions, SQL, UNIX sh, YACC; lesser experience in AWK, BASIC, COBOL, C++, FORTH, FORTRAN, JAVA, JAVAScript, M4, RPG". Missed a bet? I don't think so.
Hmm... do your python tools have a spell checker?
Yup, a utility by the name of python, checks for spelling errors and syntax errors generally. An important tool for any python programmer. ;P
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
No, whoever modded it as a troll was correct (except I wasn't really trolling). I hadn't done my homework on the MS tool I was talking about- it does a mapping from the Java 2 API to the .NET API and converts your Java code to C#. (I was thinking it went to J#.) So the post has a major factual error.
Still the original point is the same, that this is much more difficult to do with Java than with the VB->VB.net conversion which is relatively trivial.
I dunno, last I checked the camel would qualify as a pocket reference.
I also said "85 Mbyte install", not "85 Mbyte distribution".
If you go from this point, you should talk about JRE
Come on, you are grasping at straws. I didn't make a point about Java being too big for download, I made the point that the Java libraries are very, very interdependent. And Sun likes it that way because it makes it really hard to clone Java. Java isn't alone in this: a lot of runtimes that effectively had only a single codebase during a key period of their development have the same problem: CommonLisp, Smalltalk, Python, etc. And the most popular system like that: Windows. Yes, Java and Windows, sadly, are not all that different.
To prove your point about libraries, you'd have to dissect JRE and see how much of it, is libraries, and how they really depend on each other (analyzing imports for example).
Maybe you do, I just run "java -verbose helloworld.java" and notice that it loads 287 classes to get its job done, or that an 11 line Java program that puts up a label window loads 653 classes.
That's, of course, "java -verbose helloworld".
In standard Forth-83, the joke would be:
forth ?use if unemployed then
But in your case:
forth ?know not if up shut then
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
It's heartening that Java is so popular being a relatively new language and less ugly than the other top runners. You might think pure technical merits of a language would translate directly into market dominance, but inertial forces are strong.
A lot of the languages are legacy (no COBOL, though) such as VB, which is kind of ugly but practical like JavaScript, which is semi-detestable in its own right.
But it reminds me that the IT world is a practical place full of ugly old legacy code that needs to be fixed, maintained and "slightly enhanced"
Everyone hopes to get a job with a clean sexy new language (designing Ferrari's), but the reality is much different (fixing Chevy's).
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Show me another system running 50,000 users that performs as well as SF.net.
There are many sites with far more users than SourceForge. Most of them run much better, too. Simple corporate sites like Macromedia.com have 1-2 millions of users. Sites like Ebay and Amazon are pushing 100 million users.