One of the places I go to, when I'm trying to understand what is happening in the IT World is the O'Reilly Radar. Tim often puts up charts containing data about his book sales, as a means of gauging the market, but this one via this, took me by surprise.
What's Up?
Javascript is clearly the big winner, which I completely missed - this I can only put down to me just considering it part of the "fabric" of the (IT) universe, but it must be surging on the back of AJAX. The next surprise was SQL - SQL, to me, is generally, uncooperative, unexciting, and generally a "means to an end", so what is making this one resurgent (anyone?)? Finally
Ruby - this is no surprise to me. Ruby has been hanging in the wings for a number of years now, and is finally coming into it's own on the back of frameworks such as
Rails, and the fact that it is the only significant language out there that has its roots firmly in the South East Asian sector - it wouldn't surprise me in the least if it goes all the way.
What's Down?
The big clanger here is Java. As far as book sales is any indication, then Java took a hammering last year, closely followed by C++, Visual Basic, and sadly - Perl. Perl is still wallowing in it's own self-destructive juices of the never-to-be-quite-ready-for-release
Perl 6.
Watch this space
The title of Tims' original blog is a little unfortunate in this context as I'm not interested in "Language Wars", but I most certainly am interested in understanding where things are going outside of the SAP micro climate, because you can bet - sooner or later, kicking and screaming even - those of us living in the micro climate are going to be affected by these trends.
With this in mind - the most striking macro-trend, to me, is the total market share, and trajectory of the Dynamic Languages.
