Programming Languages to watch in 2011 | Hacker News Reader

Programming Languages to watch in 2011

java.dzone.com

53 pointsmcgin32 comments

Why would I choose any language which runs on the JVM now that Oracle is flexing its muscles? As much as I like Clojure, Scala and Groovy, I'm starting to steer clear of anything related to Oracle's intellectual properties.

I'm not concerned. IBM has an independent implementation, so copyright is not an issue. Oracle is not about to start a patent war with IBM, so patents are actually less of an issue than they usually are with software. The trademark issue is trivial. I'm not concerned about Oracle's IP.

"I'm not concerned about Oracle's IP." - famous last words.

:-) highly context-dependent

Oracle owns the trademark to JavaScript now too. We are going to have to call it ECMAScript to be safe.

AFAIK server-side JVM solutions are ok, but if you have dreams of shipping an appliance like solution to customers you may well have problems with Oracle.

Although, steering clear of Oracle-anything is a top priority of mine as well.

Scheme is second in jobs on indeed.com, and the author doesn't realize that his search is off?

Erlang could become "the next Python"?

What a shoddy article.

Edit: I realize that Scheme is second only among the nine niche languages. It's still bogus, as a simple search for scheme on indeed.com shows.

What did he do wrong?

Erlang will never have the same appeal to the masses as Python, not will it be as efficient at everyday scripting tasks.

Search for the string "scheme", as his trends link shows. That's a pretty common term, while "scala", "lua" etc. have no meaning other than the language, at least as far as a job site is concerned.

www.indeed.com redirects to www.indeed.ch here, but there I get nine hits for "scala" and 153 for "scheme". The scheme hits are all "Creates validation scheme with manufacturing site" etc.

Scheme is a niche language, and it's niche is education. It's almost never used in industry because it lacks a single popular standard library adds enough functionality to make it practical to use in the real world. In general, you don't write a practical scheme application, you write a practical [insert implementation]-scheme application.

It's only second among the (up-and-coming) languages he chose. Scheme takes only 0.05% of the overall job market. Witness:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java%2C+C%2C+Python%2C+sch...

Sure, at least he showed this percentage on the Y-axis. That still means there are five times as many Scheme jobs than for Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Erlang. That's not the case (although I wish it were), just search for "scheme" on indeed.com.

Do the actual search, and look at the results:

http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=scheme&l=

Not so convincing anymore, right? Obviously, 'scheme' is a generic word, giving many vacancies not related to the programming language Scheme.

There's no good way to easily gauge scheme with this site. At first I typed in "scheme programming language" and came up with 250 results, "scheme lisp" provided something slightly more relevant, but with only 45. I didn't scroll through, but even then they were only asking for people with experience in scheme (among other languages that aren't de jour, like smalltalk).

The article compares languages based on numbers of job postings. Quality of jobs != quantity of jobs.

Agreed, though ActionScript's lines are pretty interesting. Up up up.... and flat for two years.

"Bear in mind that all job postings that reference Flex or AIR would assume knowledge of Actionscript, without necessarily mentioning it."

Ah, thanks, I missed that part.

Why didn't they just include Flex / AIR in the AS results? There's clearly a strong enough connection to do so.

Agreed!

One possible explanation for the number of job postings for Actionscript is that the culture around doing Flash animations is one where there is high turnover. Thus there are lots of open jobs at any one time.

Another possible explanation is that there is a culture of paying people very little for full time jobs but overpaying agencies (who also pay little). As a result, companies are constantly hoping to hire someone at a bargain but rarely finding anyone willing to work long hours for low wages, and they are forced to go to agencies for their needs.

I don't know if either explanation is true, of course, but I do know that I'd look into a lot more than a single cherry-picked statistic before deciding I wanted to learn a new programming language.

I wonder if a more useful comparison would be salary (or rate of change of salary over time).

I started learning functional programming over Christmas 2008 for two reasons:

- Mainly because it looked fun, and very different from what I'd done before

- Although I had no idea whether F# or Haskell jobs would come up, I knew that if they did come up, they'd be just right for me

So, did any jobs come up? Looking at your blog, you seem to be have been pretty involved in F# until May.

An F# job did come up, and I'm quite happy with it :)

I'd like to be more involved in the functional programming community; it's easy to dip in and out of Twitter and forum discussions, but blogging is one thing that's dropped off since the summer.

I've been getting more and more invested in functional programming to the tune of Haskell and Erlang over the last two years. Unfortunately, the jobs seem to be all Java and Ruby on Rails, because that's what my resume says I have experience with.

Me: "I'm really interested in functional programming and scaling distributed computing."

HR: "Well, I see here you've worked on Java in the payment industry. We're always looking for more people to work on our reporting team. Let's put you over there. I think they have a J2EE web-app from eight years ago that needs a few more features."

So I find myself settling and maintaining my sanity with pet projects.

I am taking steps to rectify this.

According to that graph actionscript got stopped on its tracks the day Steve Jobs started the war against flash.

Agree with R, but certainly not with Go (not even google is dedicated to make this the next big language, they call it an "experiment") ActionScript is Flash, right?! I would say JavaScript..

And Scala and Scheme? Maybe some academics use that, but I don't know a business which relies on it.

A number of web startups are using scala for their apps, most notably foursquare. I wouldn't dismiss it as academic when the big push I am seeing for it is for use with lift (scala webapp framework).

Last time I tried it, getting started with Lift was a convoluted process. Scala is a nice language but, IMO, it needs to rid itself of dependencies on Java tools like Maven and Eclipse if it wants to get anywhere.

sbaz is nice. More sbaz everywhere would be nicer. It's one of the best language-specific package managers I've used.

Why no javascript? Seems like an obvious language to watch in terms of popularity, job market, and interesting progress.

JavaScript isn't really up-and-coming. It's been in mainstream use in browsers for a long (in internet years) time now. There may be a lot of emerging enthusiasm around JavaScript for non-browser programming such as with node.js, but it's going to be swamped by the demand for JavaScript developers in general.

This is a really odd way to approach programming languages, I feel. According to the article, none of these are very mainstream languages (although certainly scheme and clojure have their adherents, and LUA is used extensively in the game industry), but they should be watched because of hiring trends?

I'd much rather pick up a language because it has some interesting features, or because it solves a problem I have with one of the languages I already know. Seems they're missing the forest for the trees, somehow.

Whew! Haskell's not on the list.

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