From: Marc Weber Date: 2012-02-01T00:01:46+09:00 Subject: Re: the future of ruby Excerpts from mark e.'s message of Tue Jan 31 15:23:55 +0100 2012: > http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html > both ruby and php are loosing "market share", perl is holding its own, > and of course the mobile-device languages are rapidly rising. define "market share" ? How do they do it? lost 2%? Wow.. Oh, they talk about it: " The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written. " So a change in any of those sources (such as google) can cause such a 2% change for PHP which you worry about. I'd not pay attention to the index too much because - Scala is not listed (and many companies are using it making money ..) - smaller market share doesn't mean you can make less money. If in doubt you can always hire programmers knowing the target language if you have customers. > i have been a php guy for years and am considering throwing everything > into ruby, but i want to pick a language that will be around for years > to come, and be increasing in popularity. Years to come? Languages also change over years. C# 1.0 is not the same as C# 4.0 etc. I'd not throw everything into a new language. Start learning it. Start playing with the framework. Learning either Python,Ruby, ... may be an advantage because both languages are used for for more use cases such as scripting applications. Also testing support is much better in Ruby than PHP. And that its also "ruby people" creating things like 'HAML' template engines etc and its short style makes me like it and the community. Marc Weber