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Tim O'Reilly posts a trend graph showing programming language books market share from January 2003 to mid-June 2005.

As LtU readers know, I don't really care about language popularity metrics. They don't tell you much that isn't obvious.

But at least this graph is supposed to reflect real data...

By Ehud Lamm at 2005-06-19 10:01 | General | Misc Books | other blogs | 7455 reads

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bigger picture

Here's a bigger picture of the same graph:

http://poly9.com/images/19788490_a28a007a66_o.png

It's interesting that "other languages" is #4. I think the increasing awareness/popularity of Python and Ruby show that "working programmers" no longer fear new syntax or languages.

By runtime at Mon, 2005-06-20 05:23 | login or register to post comments

Ruby, really?

I think the increasing awareness/popularity of Python and Ruby show that "working programmers" no longer fear new syntax or languages.

Um, isn't the graph for Ruby the one almost hidden by the time axis?

By Andreas Rossberg at Mon, 2005-06-20 08:22 | login or register to post comments

Legends on the graph

Yes, I would say so. It seems the legends on the graph are in the same order as the values at the starting time.

By ecl at Mon, 2005-06-20 11:11 | login or register to post comments

Of course

The graph doesn't necessarily reflect the direct popularity of languages. I'm probably a bit odd but still I know pretty much all those languages and yet have not purchased a book for any of them.
In fact an elitist argument might be that the "less known languages" would naturally have fewer book sales since those who are smart enough to learn them just get their resources online anyway.

By Jeff Cutsinger at Mon, 2005-06-20 12:24 | login or register to post comments

I skew the stats the other way. :-)

Have done stuff with all the languages listed, and own books on all of them except PHP.

Since I sometimes get the feeling that I single handedly prop up the PL book industry, I thought I'd take my own informal survey of the books that I can actually locate. From my findings, I see that Smalltalk is a leading language, but ML and Scheme are rapidly gaining footholds.

29Java2ASM/68091Oz1Cobol
13Smalltalk2ASM/68k1Pascal1Delphi
7ML2CL/4001PL/I1Forth
5Scheme2Perl1Pop-111Fortran
4C2RPG1PostScript1Haskell
4C++1Ada1Prolog1Icon
4JavaScript1ASM/3861Ruby1Lisp
3Eiffel1Awk1VB1Modula/2
3Logo1C#1VBScript1Objective-C
3Python1OO Turing&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp
By Chris Rathman at Mon, 2005-06-20 14:58 | login or register to post comments