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Programming Language Popularity

[Posted September 27, 2004 by cook]

David N. Welton crunched some statistics and wrote the results up in his paper Programming Language Popularity. Take a look to see how your favorite language rates. "We examine four sources of information. First, the raw number of results found with Google's search engine. We also look at dollars per click information gleaned from an online advertising service (Overture). In other words, how much it costs you, the advertiser, per click for ads placed with search terms such as “java consulting” or “perl training”. In addition, to look at the open source community's take on the situation, we look at projects registered with freshmeat. We also use the Craig's List (http://www.craigslist.org) job search board as a source for rough job statistics."

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Posted Sep 27, 2004 20:54 UTC (Mon) by amendola (guest, #20601) [Link]

What, no Ada?

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 27, 2004 23:04 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Nor any Lisp.

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 28, 2004 6:56 UTC (Tue) by davidw (subscriber, #947) [Link]

Yes, I explained that in the article. You did read the text instead of just skimming through the charts, didn't you?:-)

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 28, 2004 11:57 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

Ah come now, David, the charts are too much fun to read the disclaimer. And how could you forget smalltalk?! ;-)

Thanks, I had a lot of fun reading it.

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 28, 2004 19:46 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Serves me right for skimming at high speed at work. Whoops. ;}

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 27, 2004 21:20 UTC (Mon) by s52d (guest, #2199) [Link]

What, no chill?

BR
Iztok

p.s.
I was really surpriced to find out chill as a part of gnu-c package.
CCITT High-Level Language.

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 27, 2004 23:05 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The chill frontend was removed in 3.0 because, well, nobody was maintaining it, nobody used it... as far as I know, zero complaints were received about that removal, as well.

If you wanted it back, it'd probably be easier to rewrite it than to try to hack in all the changes since it was removed (garbage-collection support, tree-ssa, and unit-at-a-time being the most critical that I can think of).

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 27, 2004 21:36 UTC (Mon) by rogerd (guest, #4170) [Link]

The author did not say how he did it, but how did he Google for 'C programming' without matching every word containing 'programming' and the letter 'C'? I'd hate to think that the C programming result includes the sum of languages containing the letter C...

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 27, 2004 21:56 UTC (Mon) by Felix.Braun (subscriber, #3032) [Link]

He probably did a phrase search ("C programming").

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 27, 2004 22:07 UTC (Mon) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

He didn't need to: Google is smart enough, it searches for words. ;-)

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 27, 2004 22:29 UTC (Mon) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

Since we're on the subject, I've always found it a bit strange that one cannot get partial word hits through the use of wildcards. For instance, Google doesn't seem to support e.g. "one two *ree" (try it, you get a submarine sonar operator's manual, not what you would expect. ;-).

Does anyone know why this is, or am I missing something?

(It does support wildcards for words though, so "one * three" returns exactly what you'd expect -- plus a nice calculator. ;-)

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 27, 2004 22:35 UTC (Mon) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

Search engines used to support regular expressions. They later switched
to the "AND", "+", and "-" syntax to make things easier for users. I also
believe that their distributed searching engines are happier this way so they
would have trouble switching back if they wanted.

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 28, 2004 0:08 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

You need more horsepower for in-word wildcards and very few users really want them so it was discarded in favor of whole words search and wildcards for words.

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 28, 2004 2:39 UTC (Tue) by zone (subscriber, #3633) [Link]

It just goes to show:

Only the best program in Ruby.

:)

... or in python.

Posted Sep 28, 2004 16:26 UTC (Tue) by uriel (guest, #20754) [Link]

The Python Paradox by Paul Graham

Not really...

Posted Sep 28, 2004 16:30 UTC (Tue) by uriel (guest, #20754) [Link]

Forgot to mention that in reality the best programmers don't program in Python or Ruby, they program in Limbo.

Dennis M. Ritchie: http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/papers/limbo.html

Not really...

Posted Sep 28, 2004 18:12 UTC (Tue) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link]

Funny, every time I get a software design that Sales or Marketing has had some hand in, I feel like I'm programming in Limbo.

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 28, 2004 15:28 UTC (Tue) by sandman (guest, #25060) [Link]

I'm too lazy to read the whole text but I think the statistics could also show how good or bad the docs for that language are. If I look at the documentation that comes with visual basic, I can understand why everybody looks it up on google....

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 28, 2004 19:29 UTC (Tue) by mrlee (guest, #6760) [Link]

For a more detailed statistics see the TIOBE Programming Community Index ...

Programming Language Popularity

Posted Sep 28, 2004 22:07 UTC (Tue) by davidw (subscriber, #947) [Link]

Those are indeed interesting, especially because they have time data. Some of the results, especially for the less popular languages, seem a little bit odd. Scheme more popular than Tcl/Tk? What I like about my results is that I polled 4 different sources, which I think gives some good balance.