Programming languages by popularity:
Ever wonder how many brains are wrecked on these programming languages? Lets use Google to put a perspective on the subject.
Would like to begin by taking a look at the raw Google numbers returned by looking for “perl programming”, “c programming” and so forth.
For an absolute beginner, the best programming language is one that you do not have to spend a cent to buy before you know if you like it, one that you can get help from someone you know when you need it, and one that does something useful for you. As useful means different things to different people. Lets see how useful are current programming languages!
These numbers are really a measure of how “visible” a language is rather than its popularity, necessarily.
We can see that the C language is the most visible language by this measure. Java and PHP, both popular languages of late, are next.
Cobol, included in this study to compare a mature technology that is definitely not “the hot new thing”, comes in last, not surprising given that its heyday was before the advent of the web.
PHP is very visible, coming in just behind Java, which Sun has spent millions of dollars to market over the past 8 years or so. PHP’s high visibility may well stem from the fact that it is mainly a web language, so that it would be natural for it to appear disproportionately on the web.
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**charts with Hecl programming language and JFreeChart.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 4:52 pm and is filed under I Love Programming!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.