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."

Comments

Not too valid.

[BigZaphod]

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.

A few methodology problems

[AuMatar]

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.