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C# and Java Weekday Languages, Python and Ruby For Weekends?
Dan Lorenc writes "Using the StackOverflow.com data dump, I measured the activity of various programming languages throughout the week. The results: Ruby and Python saw a rise in questions asked on the weekend while C# and Java saw a dropoff in activity on the weekend. This means that more programmers are using Python and Ruby on the weekend for their personal projects, showing that these languages are more fun to use. Show this experiment to your boss the next time you are selecting a programming language for a project at work."
Perhaps this only indicates that Java and C# are used more by professionals and Python and Ruby are used more by amateurs. No matter where they work (whether or not they're using Java or C# or even programming at work), it merely indicates that people who use Python and Ruby are active during the weekend.
Perhaps this simply means that Python and Ruby are more popular with amateur F/OSS and web developers, something that is so obvious it doesn't even necessitate an article.
Depends on what world you're living in. If you're an Unix Systems admin, there is an aweful lot of perl around. Especially if you are doing any type of log analysis. We've used PERL to generate billing reports and other tasks on the backend for years and the same goes for a lot of systems tasks. But recently we've found ourselves going back to PERL for a lot of our web work.
We've just started porting our web-based apps from PHP to PERL because we're moving from PostgreSQL to an Enterprise class database system that has 2 PERL modules that support it and PHP has nothing but ODBC. And our tests show that MOD_PERL with the database DBI module is much faster than PHP/ODBC. Script execution time is slower, but database access time is an order of magnitude better in PERL.
That being said, all of our Desktop GUI interfaces are written in JAVA. We looked at Python and C#, but the local university teaches 4 - 6 semesters of JAVA in their CS department. We can always find someone local to maintain Java based code. Not so much with Python. C# is nice, but JAVA is still write once, run on any desktop. So we don't have to worry if our clients are running Windows, Mac, or Linux. It just works.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I've been making inroads at the (unnamed) aerospace company where I work in getting people to use Python and the pylab and numpy libraries in place of MATLAB. Not only is it free vs. several thousand dollars, but it's faster, more flexible, and makes your teeth whiter. I've been much happier and more productive since I switched.
We also use "R" for a lot of analysis rather than MATLAB.
Sheldon