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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."
This "study" has been showing up all over the net over the past couple days. I don't understand why it keeps getting so much attention. It is basically just a bunch of google searches and pretty graphs which tell you very little. It claims to be a programming language survey and yet has entries like "Windows programming." What language is that? Heck, there isn't even a c++ option and c++ is probably still one of the most popular of all languages.
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Not convinced of the relevance of google hits with regards to different languages. People search for information about different languages for different reasons. It also seems fairly logical to say that the easier a language is to learn and use - the less one needs to search for information about it.
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Remember Y2K when all of those millions of lines of COBOL code had to be fixed (or at least fudged).
COBOL does what it does and does it well enough that it's not been unseated, but it sure as heck isn't cool.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
People have made some reasonable suggestions about languages to add. Fortran, Delphi, and C++ (although the "C/C++ issue" presents itself here) are things I will probably add, because they show up in the Overture results.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
Beyond the ones listed already:
*For things like TTCL, shell, and SQL, these are usually secondary skills wanted along with another language (C, perl, PHP, Java). This means an artificially inflated count for them
*Bias in the web. A lot of programming subareas just don't have much web presence- firmware for example. A lot of these are tilted to C, Cobol, and Fortran. Nobody writes firmware in Java.
*Internal code. Most projects are never released to the public. Unless they have a job opening being advertised, we don't know what language they're using.
*Job listings- there's an inherent assumption that web job listings are reepresentative of the industry as a whole. It may be, but I have no evidence either way. It wouldn't surprise me to see web-realted jobs have a higher proportional representation.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
You maybe ridding yourself of fortran but "we" (big chunks of the HPC community) are not: There WAS a fad for recoding stuff in C or C++, but people are now going back to fortran since they've realised that numerics-heavy and efficiently vectorised fortran code is easier to read than numerics-heavy and vectorised C code (assuming you know both C and fortran and the relevant extensions to C). Don't write an OS kernel in Fortran. Don't write a weather simulator in C. Don't write anything in VB.
Am I the only one who's opinion of this guy changed from "so-so" after RTFA to "what a fuckin' jerk!" after reading this post?
Yes. I happened to find his little mind exercise somewhat fun and interesting, which I gather is all he was going for.
The people above just completely missed the point, and started pointing out statistical and methodological holes in a "for the hell of it" fun project. He tried to explain as such.
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You are talking about search queries, and your assertions are indeed correct. However, Google does not release that information as far as I know. It would certainly be another interesting dimension to add.
What I am talking about is google results. How many pages turn up if you type 'java' or type 'java programming'. There are of course some defects with this - it might be considered 'visibility' rather than 'popularity', and yet... and yet it does count for something, folks.
How can you consider it invalid if you do not understand what it is about, and in any case only discuss potential flaws with one data source? I don't think that's very fair.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
Googling for a language is a completely useless way of determing the popularity. Three of the first 10 results for ".net programming" have nothing to do with .net at all. By the same logic, programming with the Windows COM object model ranks along side C in terms of popularity - "com programming" returns 35 million results.
This study has no credibility whatsoever.
Sorry if this comes across as a troll (posting as AC isn't helping, I'm sure), but this isn't very credible. A Google query for "sql programming" may well fall into the PHP, Java or any other category. It most certainly can't stand on itself in this particular survey. The data is hopelessly flawed from the outset.
The FA even says: "SQL doesn't have a lot of web space devoted to it, but it's sure important in the job market."
Why doesn't the author draw the logical conclusions when the facts are staring him in the face? It doesn't have that many pages because it's independent of the programming language used and in some cases even independent of the specific database used to some extent. Webpages covering basic querying according to the SQL9* standard will work in hundreds of combinations of programming languages and databases.
And this, my friends, is why Slashcode needs to let the users vote on stories before they're published. I'd give this one a big, fat -1. (I could point out that Scoop has this feature but I realize that my comment is borderline -1, Troll as it is.)
You have obviously not programmed in a real language. VB is way too wordy to be readable, the underlying object structure that M$ throws at you is too redundant and obfuscated to be efficient. I have written many, albeit reasonably stable, application in VB to know it's serious shortcomings.
Don't be blind, open your eyes to real programming languages and you will never look back. However if you wish to live in a Microsoft world along with all the other M$ speudo programmers making very little, be my guest.
I personally turn down VB projects all the time. Instead, I currently only accept Java, python and tcl based based projects. If I did client applications, they would most likely be in C/C++ but for the last few years I've been working on J2EE projects where VB is an option but... why?
Besides, VB is not where the real cool programming jobs are anyway. There are way too many bad VB programmers to be appreciated as a good VB programmer. More is NOT better.
JsD
You're right, I was a little harsh with my post.
I am a self taught programmer who started programming spreadsheets about 6 years ago. I coded alot of VB and many of the apps I wrote are still functioning to this day. At the time that I moved away from VB was due to terrible experience trying to build a large VBA application on Access.
Microsoft always stated that VB was Object Oriented language and at the time, I had no idea what that really meant. However after doing extensive OOP in Java and JavaScript, I know what OOP really was and that VB was not it. Their concept that a Module was the `object` is too simple to be useful and as such VB apps can only be pushed so far.
Maybe, I would consider looking at VB if they have real OO programming and if the pay was good enough for me to consider the job. In the meantime I perfer hacking on my Unix boxes.
Tim