Monday, May 12, 2008

Which scripting language is most popular?

This is a totally unscientific bit of research to answer a question about the popularity of various scripting languages posed to me by Mike Chambers. After a quick search, it appears that there was no reliable data available. I deferred to a far less than scientific methodology to find out which of the four big languages (ActionScript, JavaScript, Perl, and VBScript) I am following are leading in different categories.

I realize that there are some languages left off this list. This is because I am lazy (something which I have admitted to before).

Here is the survey as of May 2008:

Monster.com jobs keyword search

The scientist must consider that first off, it only shows that JavaScript got over 5000, not the exact number. In all fairness, I never did a search on “Flash,” which includes ActionScript Skills. I figured if I had done this, I probably would have had to also search for “AJAX,” which obviously includes JavaScript. Here are the results in order of ranking.
* Did not give exact number


Book searches on Amazon also appear to be totally unscientific. Given that Perl has been around the longest and was powering most of the first Internet bubble, it is no surprise it topped the rankings. ActionScript came in a dismal last place.

Perl 20,317
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=perl&x=0&y=0

I decided to supplement this search with additional searches on “Flash” and “AJAX” to capture more of the current AS and JS crowd books.

Google results “(term) developer”

For this search, the terms were enclosed in quotes making it a string search. Otherwise I suspected all the pages that merely contained the Script type="JavaScript” element and attribute set would have come up falsely strong. In fact, most pages that have Flash use JavaScript to load them and do detection of Flash Player version etc. The results here show that there are still lot of people discussing Perl Developers however ActionScript did come in second.

Perl developer 352,000
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22perl+developer%22&btnG=Search

So what does it all mean? Not much really - it is an unscientific approximation of which scripting language might be more popular.

Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. Barry B12 May 2008, 14:04:00

    you can try something like this:

    http://twist.flaptor.com/freq?gram=Flex%2C+silverlight

    it's no more scientific - in fact it's no better than tabloid newspapers but it does show who's talking about what.

    and we all know ... there's only one thing worse than being talked about .. and that's *not* being talked about..

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous24 May 2008, 03:51:00

    I believe Javascript is the scripting language use more in the internet. May be pages discussing about the Javascript Developer is comparitivly lesser than other script developers.

    ReplyDelete

Do not spam this blog! Google and Yahoo DO NOT follow comment links for SEO. If you post an unrelated link advertising a company or service, you will be reported immediately for spam and your link deleted within 30 minutes. If you want to sponsor a post, please let us know by reaching out to duane dot nickull at gmail dot com.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)