Programmer, Property Tycoon, Media Mogul
About 10 days ago, I got a call from a journalist for the IT section of The Australian, a national daily newspaper in (you guessed it) Australia.
The article is, so I understood, a comparative look at ASP and PHP, and the article came out today. I haven’t bought it yet, but a friend just called me to tell me I’m in there!
I’ll post back again once I’ve read the article and give my opinions.
I was challenged to justify my position this morning, that PHP is a popular programming language.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have figures in my head, and the other person told me that Sourceforge had 12,000 Java projects, and only 2,000 PHP projects.
This post is my attempt to pull together a whole load of stats on various programming languages.
My first jump from google’s search results was to TIOBE Programming Community Index, which lists programming languages based on the availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors - a good indicator of the way the market is going.
TOIBE, as of today, report:
| Position Mar 2006 |
Position Mar 2005 |
Delta in Position |
Programming Language | Ratings Mar 2006 |
Delta Mar 2005 |
Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | Up | Java | 21.889% | +3.01% | A |
| 2 | 1 | Down | C | 17.794% | -1.67% | A |
| 3 | 3 | Same | C++ | 11.159% | -0.47% | A |
| 4 | 4 | Same | PHP | 9.948% | +0.53% | A |
| 5 | 6 | Up | Basic | 9.892% | +2.99% | A |
| 6 | 5 | Down | Perl | 6.421% | -2.73% | A |
| 7 | 7 | Same | C# | 3.146% | +0.61% | A |
| 8 | 8 | Same | Python | 3.093% | +0.66% | A |
| 9 | 9 | Same | Delphi/Kylix | 1.843% | -0.29% | A |
| 10 | 11 | Up | JavaScript | 1.733% | +0.08% | A |
| 11 | 12 | Up | SAS | 1.337% | +0.07% | A |
| 12 | 10 | Down 2 | PL/SQL | 0.990% | -0.68% | A |
It looks, according to these results, that PHP will soon take 3rd place from C++ in the “market demand” arena, while Java and C battle out for first, with twice the demand each.
While PHP’s own stats show a steady increase in the usage of PHP, it’s not obvious whether the graph indicates the number of installations of PHP, or actual usage. It might be argued that the two are approximately equal, as a shared hosting provider might install PHP once for all users of a single IP address, and many users would use PHP. This might balance out the dedicated servers that have PHP installed but run no applications that use PHP. In following their link to the NetStats Survey, from where these resutls are apparently taken, I was unable to find any information relating to PHP usage anywhere on the site.
Just for a bit of fun (and yes, this only counts web based language usage, sort of) I asked google how many php, asp, aspx and jsp pages it had in its index:
php: 1,360,000
asp: 277,000
jsp: 25,000
aspx: 13,500
Note: those numbers probably mean nothing! There may be 42,309,194 asp pages hidden from search engines. Developers might be naming their jsp files .php to confuse attackers.
Do you have any other stats sources?
The OSDC AGM will be held on Wednesday the 22nd of March at 6:30pm
The address is:
myinternet House
Level 8, 14-20 Blackwood St.
North Melbourne
Come along and help us make the 2006 Open Source Developers’ Conference a reality.
Nominations may be made by the 15th of March by email to ben@osdc.com.au. Your message should include the name of the person you are nominating, and the position you are nominating them for.
The current positions are:
This will be our third year, and we are now in a position to
consolidate the gains of the last two conferences, and put on our best
conference yet.
We are delighted with the increased international awareness of the
OSDC movement, now that OSDC Israel is underway and OSDC::Taiwan is
planned for April this year.
Everyone is welcome to the AGM. This is a grass roots effort and we need all the help we can get.
Scott took Sandrine and me gliding for my birthday. I think I’m already hooked…
A bizarre little movie is making its rounds - the Simpsons’ intro played out with real actors.
The actors, apparently chosen because they can be easily identified with, finally settle on their couch to watch the cartoon version of the show.
Personally, I can’t see that little boy looking evil, cackling maniacally or burning ants under a magnifying glass…
