What are the various popularity metrics and sites for programming languages such as Ruby, Python, Java, etc?

Question

What are the various sites that offer metrics that compare Ruby, Python, Perl, Smalltalk etc. What are their respective metrics?

Do any of them control or account for the time that Rails was introduced, and/or the adoption rates for various languages?

Will someone please help me close this question? Clearly it was not a successful venture :-)

Answer 1

TIOBE attempts to rate the popularity of programming languages. Ruby is in the top 10 just below Perl. Therefore I would say that your investment is protected. As or what the index actually measures they can explain it better than I can.

Answer 2

I don't mean to be nasty but what you are saying sounds like this to me: "I enjoy programming in Ruby and really don't want to learn another technology. Is there a site that can tell me that Ruby is not going away anytime soon to put my mind at ease?".

There is nothing wrong with that attitude but you have to be prepared to adapt to the changing environment and learn new technologies, techniques, do a little self-improvement if you want to remain competitive. Plenty of people are comfortable using five different programming languages. Boxing yourself into a narrow field will eventually disadvantage you.

You will also find that learning a second language is a lot easier than the first one. At the end of the day good programmers transcend the language barriers. This is what you should be doing instead of reading metrics that tell you that your language of choice is still popular.

Answer 3

Also, see Google trends comparing number of searches for ruby, python, php and perl over time.

Answer 4

I usually use Google Trends for this:
http://www.google.com/trends

The more popular an item is (in this case a language) the more that people are searching for it.

If you look at this chart on Google Trends:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=+Ruby,+Python,+Perl,+Smalltalk
you'll see that they've all stayed pretty much flat except for Perl that's been steadily declining.

Answer 5

One of the more interesting metrics is the State of the Computer Book Market posts that Mike Hendrickson posts on his O'Reilly Radar blog. I tend to favor metrics that are tied to the exchange of value rather than spotty things like the number of search engine queries. His latest post doesn't drill down into topic areas, but sometimes they do (using nice TreeMaps even).

Answer 6

Better than Google trends is Google insight. It allows you to limit queries to a given subject, like eg programming. And since all of smalltalk, ruby, python, and perl are also used in other context, I limited the search to programming.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=smalltalk%2Cruby%2Cpython%2Cperl

If you choose "growth relative to category" the boost of Ruby search queries in 2005 is striking.

Answer 7

Don't Worry

I also like Ruby¹, and I worried about exactly the same thing.

But a closer look at the same data allayed my fears.

• Ruby's Tiobe Index score has been fairly stable, after a big jump in popularity when Rails exploded onto the scene.
• Ruby is in the top ten, albeit in the 10-slot. That's really quite good. It will pass Perl any day now and be #9, and may someday pass VB and, who knows, perhaps even C++.
• Perhaps an initial decline was expected. Not long ago, hardly anyone knew Ruby, but lots of us knew the other languages. So perhaps a temporary flurry of Ruby activity was expected as people got up to speed.
• Ruby is a great language. C and Java rule the world because both languages really do solve certain problems effectively. Ruby does too and it has the attention of the technology trend-setters. How much better could it really get?
• You can learn another language easily. There is a worry, just not the one you identified. The problem is you won't want to work in lesser languages after learning Ruby and RoR.

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^{1. The original version of the question revealed a concern about the future of Ruby.}