O’Reilly On The State Of Computer Languages
Tim O’Reilly has put together a useful visualisation of the relative popularities, and growth in sales, of books on computer programming languages.
A few things to note from the graph. C#.NET is seeing a big increase in popularity, it’s now getting close to Java in terms of absolute book sales. This fits in with anecdotal evidence from people that I talk to, saying that a number of sectors, including investment banking, are investing heavily in C#.NET for new projects. Java is still more popular than C# though (probably).
Other things to note…
Ruby is growing really quickly – a 689% growth in book sales. In absolute terms, it’s still much smaller than Java or C#. However, it has now overtaken Perl and Python; and now has PHP in its sights.
JavaScript is a hell of a lot more popular than I would have expected, and growing really quickly (177% growth). I guess the interest around AJAX is a big part of that.
Truth about book sales wrote:
Is that it reflects what people don’t know about as well as an interest in knowing about stuff. This is why publishers are always looking for and hyping the next big thing – to drive book sales. A sign of success is if something isn’t new and still sells lots of books.
There is lots of noise on the web about apple but doesn’t mean they are the major OS, perhaps gaining a little share recently, but still a curiosity to most people than work horse.
Posted 12 Aug 2006 at 5:28 pm ¶
Aree Cohen wrote:
Using book sales as a measure of programming language popularity seems to be a pretty simplistic and short sighted yardstick. As a developer, I only go out to purchase a programming book if I can’t find the level of detailed information I need on the net. Large sales of books can also imply that there are less teaching resources for that topic on the internet – otherwise known as the information super highway. Moreover, I believe that as a language becomes more popular, there is a proportional increase in the amount of tutorials and other teaching resources on the internet, further slowing the book sales rate for that programming language. With all that said, pretty colourful charts are fun to look at
Posted 30 Mar 2007 at 12:24 am ¶