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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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I think he left out a lot of languages. Delphi should certanly register, as well as a number of scripting languages (vbscript, javascript). It looks like he just picted a subset of languages that he could think of and used those.
I dont consider this to be great research on their part.
Bad User. No biscuit!
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/
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.
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Javascript is a nicer language than many people realise. Just as Java is a slightly crippled Smalltalk with C-like syntax, Javascript is a slightly crippled Self with C-like syntax. Respectable full-scale applications can be coded in javascript with e.g. IBM Sash.
Don't get me wrong. I program in FORTRAN for a living, but I have compared it to C and Java. FORTRAN is an ugly language. It fosters the same disgust that x86 assembly code would foster if we lacked compilers and were forced to program in it on a routine basis. FORTRAN is just a bunch of mishmash that has grown to include every interesting feature that catches the fancy of programmers. The current definition of FORTRAN even includes pointers!
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/
Um, I've been tracking this for a while.
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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?
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/
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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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.)
So? He said that C is popular.
:p
I'll believe any article that likes C.
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
COBOL isn't dead. It isn't just for mainframes either. COBOL is quite alive and kicking. The latest ISO standard for it was just released in 2002. It's got functions, can do OOP (better than C++, BTW) and still can crunch data batter than any other language out there. It's a shame that the preconceptions and stigma perpetuated by people who haven't seen COBOL since 1968 are really hampering the usefulness of this really good langauge to the detriment of every developer in the world.
Disclaimer: The programming I do is 75% php, 10% perl and 15% in shell/awk/grep/whatever. It's just that I have a liking for programming languages in general and like to keep an eye on them. There's a lot of very good ones out there that most everybody misses; icon, Eiffel, Smalltalk, Ada, REBOL, Lua, Dylan...
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
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