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Comment by carbon8 | Hacker News Reader

Since you are comparing it to PHP and Ruby, it appears that your comment refers to their use in web development. I can't say much about the broader use of the languages, but here is some perspective regarding the web development side.

A little over a year ago I compared the jobs available for PHP, Django and Rails (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=805931). I did the same again 3 months ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1459119). A quick glance now shows the same trend and ratios (eg, simply hired has 20,125 PHP jobs, a 25% increase in 3 months; 5,334 Rails jobs, a 39% increase in 3 months; and 1,153 Django jobs, a 25% increase in 3 months).

TL;DR: PHP, Django and Rails jobs are all on the rise, there are vastly more PHP jobs than either Rails or Django jobs and there are many more Rails jobs than Django jobs, and this applies to startups, too.

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Wait, that makes no sense. Why compare a language like PHP with a framework like Rails or Django. Shouldn't you compare CakePHP, Symfony, or Zend, instead of PHP? Or compare PHP against Python and Ruby?

Practical considerations I would assume: Django dominates the large majority of Python jobs, while Rails dominates the large majority of Ruby jobs out there. PHP has a much more divided split.

Django does not dominate Python jobs at all. Just look at this:

Python 19,381 jobs http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=python&l=

Django 1,057 jobs http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Django&l=

Django doesn't even dominate Python web related jobs if you accept "Python JavaScript" as a proxy for Python web related jobs: http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Python+Javascript&l= gives you 4,671 jobs. Granted for many of them Python is not the main skill asked for.

Python is used by sysadmins and by scientists and even in financial services combined with C++. The combination of Python and C++ is requested 7,165 times. Compare that with "PHP C++" 3,051, "Ruby C++" 2,277, "Java C++" 25,675 and "C# C++" 13,045.

So Python has become a language that is very broadly used in all kinds of development jobs.

Django does not dominate Python jobs at all.

We are discussing web development jobs in this particular thread.

Django doesn't even dominate Python web related jobs

Yes, it does. SimplyHired: Django 1168, Pylons 143, TurboGears 18, Zope 96, web.py 5.

"Python JavaScript"...Granted for many of them Python is not the main skill asked for

Exactly the problem with that approach. It's relatively common to list a bunch of languages including Javascript, Ruby and Python in desired experience for any non-MS web development job, but pretty uncommon to list specific frameworks unless that's what the job is for.

That Django dominates among Python web frameworks is undisputed. But you can't just count all Python web dev jobs towards Django even though it isn't mentioned in most of the adverts. Many employers might not care about the framework or leave that to the developer they hire.

Python is used extensively outside of web development, PHP is not. Django is far more prevalant than other Python web frameworks, eg, Django 1168 vs Pylons 143 on SimplyHired.

Also, if you follow my links you'll see that the subjects of the comparison originally came from a poll.

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