From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2006-10-01T08:48:25+09:00 Subject: Re: Hot new programming languages - according to the TIOBE i Roseanne Zhang wrote: > Take a look at this diagram in job market: > http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=Java-programmer%2C+C%2B%2B--programmer%2C+python-programmer%2C+perl-programmer%2C+ruby-programmer%2C+php-programmer > I'm going to make a rather bold claim here. I will claim that the percentage breakdown of programming jobs by language is for all practical purposes equal to the percentage breakdown of lines of legacy code written in those languages that needs to be maintained. In short, it has nothing to do with the quality of the language, the suitability of the language for the software in question, whether the language is "powerful" or "hot" or "productive", or any factors dealing with the creation of *new* software. So all that chart says is that there are more lines of legacy Java code that needs to be maintained than there are lines of legacy C++ code, and more C++ code than the major scripting languages. I couldn't even find the Ruby line on the chart because of the color scheme, but I think most of us can count the major projects implemented in Ruby, including Rails, on one's fingers. The only thing that surprised me on that chart was that C++ was so much higher than PHP. I'm guessing that's because PHP was a late bloomer in the Microsoft world, while C++ was there almost from the beginning -- well before Java, in fact. There's a lot of legacy PHP code out there, though.