Web Programming Language Popularity Contest
Curiosity and all the press around newer programming languages prompted me to do some research on the popularity of various Web progrmaming languages. I figured I may as well share what I found, so I plugged the data I collected into BlueVue and ran off some pretty charts for your viewing pleasure. Please keep in mind that I don’t pretend to be a statistician here, I just gathered some data from publicly available sources to get a bearing on the popularity of these various languages. And I had to do a few things like substitute “Ruby on Rails” for “Ruby” in some cases to get more meaningful data. That said, here’s what I found:
Job Market
Available jobs are a pretty good indicator of the number of development projects for a given language. Java pretty much dominates in this area, with C# coming in a distant second, and ASP.NET and PHP not too far behind. Not a bad showing for Microsoft, actually.
Monthly Searches
Monthly searches show pretty much the same trend, Java is the 800-lb gorilla here too. Surprisingly, though, Javascript is second even though it’s not anywhere near the top in available jobs. I suppose that could be because it’s almost the de-facto programming language of the Web, so all the hobbyist and design programmers tend to use it as well.
Open Source Projects
Ah, open source projects, the secret sauce for many programmers and the foundation of many custom development projects. Java still wins this round, but PHP gives it a run for its money. C# gives a strong showing as well, surprisingly–strong open source support for a proprietary language, very interesting.
Dollars Per Click
Every programming has an ecosystem of products around it, whether its training and certification, IDE’s, or debugging and profiling tools. The dollars per click that advertisers are willing to pay is a good indication of how much competition there is for upsells of the language, and in this area Java finally meets some serious competition from PHP.
Books Available
I’m not surprised that Java dominates the number of books available since it’s been around the longest, but C# again makes a strong showing here coming in right after PHP.
Search Trends
For good measure, I thought I’d check out the search trends from Google for these languages:
c#Â Â 
php  
python  
javascript  
java 
Java dominates again, and I had to leave out Ruby, ASP.NET, and VB.NET since Google would only let me chart five terms and those came in last. The search numbers for Java, PHP, and Javascript seem to be dropping, I would assume that’s due to the rising popularity of the newer languages like Ruby on Rails and terms like AJAX to replace “Javascript” while still referring to the same thing.
Blog Trends
Finally, I decided to check out what the blogosphere was saying about the top three contenders (BlogPulse limits me to three). PHP is actually giving Java a run for its money in terms of blog activity, and Javascript is right up there with them.It’ll be interesting to go back and do a comparison like this in a year to see how the trends are really panning out. The newer languages do seem to be making a dent in the market, however a little slower than I expected they would. It’ll also be interesting to see if Java can maintain its extreme dominance for an extended period of time with all of the competition it’s facing now.
