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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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I agree. I am also unimpressed by the following analysis:
In the case of .Net, this is especially impressive, given the relatively short time the platform has been in existance. It is likely that a significant portion of the hits are in some way the result of Microsoft's marketing dollars.
Given that Google ignores punctuation, it seems most likely that they got a listing about "net language" rather than ".net language". More a result of poor methodology then marketing dollars.
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?
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 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