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Programming Language Popularity Survey
An anonymous reader writes "David N. Welton yesterday posted a study of the Programming Language Popularity. Is SQL your fave, or perhaps you're interested in the 'Click Price of PHP' or 'Craig's List Jobs'? Needless to say, my favorite languages (Prolog and Common Lisp) did not so much as register on the survey."
Unfortunately, I don't seem to have communicated the idea behind the survey very well. Let's give it a go here before too many snide, uninformed comments show up about "windows programming".
*) It is for fun. If I were investing the time and money to produce a survey for you to base your business on, I would not give it away for free, or I would have at the very least aimed for publishing it in a magazine like Dr. Dobbs.
*) This means that I used the resources at my disposition as best I could. Those include freely available sources on the web. Part of why I think the survey does have some broad validity is that I tried to find a variety of sources (which you would realize if, you uhm, actually read the article). In a future version, I think I will also attempt to include data from Amazon about books available for whatever language.
*) Why isn't XYZ in the list?! There are lots of programming languages out there. In a recent gig, I was programming Erlang, and liked it a lot. But to give some sort of cutoff, I chose the Overture dollars/click data, which isn't present for lots of "minor" languages. By the way, Cobol figures better in Overture than Lisp and Prolog do, even though Lisp is in my opinion far, far more interesting.
*) If you think the methodology could use improvement, well then by all means send me some email with your ideas, or if you're the independent sort, go off and do your own work if you think you can do better.
*) Google Hits. Yes, I used that. I also used 3 other data sources, so RTFA before you make uninformed comments. In any case, even if there are some problems with Google hits, they *do* represent the visibility of the language. Suggestions on how to deal with specific queries such as VB vs "visual basic" are of course welcome.
*) "Windows" and "Unix" programming. Those who engage their brains for a second or two might come to the realization that, no, they are not programming languages, but queries I threw in as extra data points, for the fun of it. Sheesh.
Does that put it in a clearer like for those of you with your knickers in a knot?
Thanks,
-Dave
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
The question is: how to get the best possible results out of google, where "best results" mean few false positives, and rather than exact numbers, numbers that can be compared across languages. Adding "programming" is a nice way to get rid of false positives, while still assuring a "level playing field" between all languages. Adding "language" or "programming language" might work well too, although they wouldn't work so well for oddball things like windows or unix that I threw in for fun.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
> because something is language/implementation independant, it will be less visible on the web?
Yes, because people discussing Oracle or Sybase programming may never even use the word "SQL". The queries would be biased towards MS-SQL and MySQL.
Since the 1990 standard it's spelled "Fortran". I've noticed that people who misspell it often have little knowledge of it.
:: x(:,:,:)
In their handling of arrays, C and C++ are closer to assembly language than Fortran. Allocating a 3-D array in Fortran is done with just
real, allocatable
allocate(x(2,3,4))
In C/C++ you declare a pointer to a pointer to a pointer -- talk about ugly!
Fortran 90/95 pointers are less powerful (and dangerous) than those of C/C++ but are still useful. Often I find myself referring repeatedly to an array section. Using a pointer I can refer to this section more concisely.