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Web Programming Language Popularity Contest

February 19, 2007 By Jason Kolb 16 Comments

Webprogramminglanguagepo

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

Jobs

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

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

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

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

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#    php    python    javascript    java Trends

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

Blogtrends

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.

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Filed Under: Software Development
  • Raffaele

    "I'm not surprised that Java dominates the number of books available since it's been around the longest"
    That's simply FALSE:
    http://www.levenez.com/lang/history.html#05

    Python 1991
    Ruby 1993
    Java 1995

    If java is more popular, is certainly not for it's "age".

  • http://www.chrisaycock.com/ Christopher C. Aycock

    Thanks for this survey. It's interesting to note that Java and PHP still manage to hold their positions, most likely because of legacy applications. It's also interesting to note that ASP.NET and C# are increasing in popularity over the likes of Ruby and Python. So Microsoft and legacy code both still prevail.

  • http://jicksta.com Jay Phillips

    Actually, I think graph of open-source Ruby projects needs a small bit of readjusting.

    While it may be acceptable to count only projects from SF or Freshmeat for the other languages, the Ruby scene almost unanimously posts open-source projects on RubyForge.org because of that site's integration with Ruby's package manager RubyGems.

    As of writing this RubyForge.org hosts 2,886 open-source Ruby projects.

  • http://www.goldb.org Corey

    I like your benchmarks and presentation of the data. you should definitely update this every 6 months or year and post it again.

    thanks.

  • Asbjørn Ulsberg

    I think it would be a more useful survey if you differentiated frameworks from languages. J2EE is the framework (well, one of them), Java is the language. ASP.NET is the framework, C# is the language (well, one of them). PHP is … uhm. But yea, you get my point. ;-)

  • Paul

    Although not a measure of popularity, it'd be interesting to see a chart with the average salaries for those languages as well.

  • Anonymous Coward

    I'm sure you didn't mean to, but you've got apples and oranges going here. ASP.NET, C#, and VB.NET are all the same platform! You can do exactly the same things with VB.NET and C# — every program that can be written in one language can be written in the other, producing exactly the same binary. ASP.NET is just the web toolkit, like JSP in Java. When you add them together, it's Microsoft .NET that's the 800-lb gorilla. I would love to see an updated version of this post that combines .NET technologies the way you have combined Java technologies!

  • http://www.jasonkolb.com Jason Kolb

    Thanks for the feedback everyone, I'll probably redo this at some point taking into consideration the feedback (for example, I wasn't aware of RubyForge). As far as comparing apples to oranges–I know. However, if I would have lumped all of the related Java technologies like JSP, Servlets, Struts, etc into the Java category, the only thing you would have been able to see on the chart would have been Java, everything else would be microscopic. I'll tell ya right now, Java absolutely trounces everything else out there :) I conciously made the decision to leave those out so that the rest of the chart would at least be somewhat informative. And yes I'm aware that ASP.NET, VB.NET, and C# are all Microsoft, but they are all Web programming languages in a sense and they all have enough market share to be relevant in the comparison.

  • http://depressionisms.com/tblog/ Craig

    Jason, if you redo, those Google Trends charts can be misleading. eg. Python = Language and Snake. I tack "programming" or "tutorial" or "code" etc on to the ends of the search keywords. Also I like the tiobe language comparison and Tim O'Reilly' State of the Computer Book Market (when taken in context) aswell.

  • http://www.jasonkolb.com Jason Kolb

    @Craig – Yeah, I know… once you start putting something like this together you start realizing all the different ways people could search for these various langauges (python = snake & language for example, or including "code" or "programming" at the end of each term, as you mentioned). I didn't want to turn this into a thesis paper though, so what I did is just take the most popular term I could find for each language and assumed that the outlier phrases would be roughly equivalent for each language. And in the case of a term like "python", I erred on the side of popularity (eg including all python searches instead of trying to extract the snake searches) since everything pales pretty badly in comparison to Java anyway.

  • http://www.website-md.com Thomas Branch

    Great article. It definitely puts together a clear picture of who's doing what. I respect Java but I am happy I don't have to deal with it. I'll keep my PHP and RoR development thanks!

  • AA

    If monster.com's job postings are supply (posted by HR and employers), and monthly searches are demand (searches made by people who know the language), we can try to see how easy/hard to find a job that ties to each language:

    Java: 33 searches/job
    ASP.NET: 7 searches/job
    C#: 1 search/job
    JavaScript: 31 searches/job
    Ruby: 294 searches/job
    VB.NET: 3 searches/job
    Python: 135 searches/job
    PHP: 176 searches/job

    As a result, if you're looking for jobs, you should learn (in order):
    C#
    VB.NET
    ASP.NET
    JavaScript
    Java

  • http://lui.arbingersys.com/ arbingersys

    Hm. Perl, noticeably, seems missing. Not sure if this was intentional or just an oversight.

    Here's a metric page, I've created, called LUI. LUI is the "Open Source" version of indexes. You can check out the code that generates the numbers, and all the raw data is also available.

    http://lui.arbingersys.com/

  • http://profile.typekey.com/nascar2000/ nascar

    great article , i would go for open source languages than propriety languages. open source languages allow us to do more research on.

  • http://www.stephencarr.net Stephen

    Seriously, How can PHP not be the best? The sheer fact that you have more resources and open source projects means you have more to lean on if you are a programmer. Open source PHP, Linux etc is FREEEEEE…. because of that more people will use it, and thus it will eventually dominate.. JAVA is crap because you have to compile it… No need for desktop apps anymore, thus PHP is the best choice.

  • Moslembd

    Hi,

    I can’t see the pictures. Please re-upload them!