Computer Language Popularity Trend

[cartercc at gmail.com]

sjdevnull at yahoo.com wrote:
> At the site I'm working on, you'd see a URL like
> http://www.whatever.com/login or http://www.whatever.com/boards?id=131
> -- how would you count them?  Such (extensionless) URLs are far more
> common in the Python, Ruby, and Java world in my experience than the
> PHP, Perl, and ASP world, so my first instinct looking at your numbers
> is to believe they're just biased toward languages that more often put
> the extension in the URL.

Yeah. CGI is more than Perl, CGI also includes TCL and Python, and
perhaps some others. In my limited JSP developments, we didn't use file
extensions.

I don't think you can use any measure as an accurate yardstick, but
rather as an impressionistic canvas. Just because there are five times
as many .cgi extensions as .jsp extensions doesn't mean that Perl is
five times more popular that Java. Also, web apps tend to stick around,
and we don't have a sure way to gauge the age of these pages, so it
could be that, in the last year, the ration of JSP to CGI pages is five
to one in favor of JSP.

To some extent, the popularity of technologies is driven by the
available resources. If there are many more Java programmers than Perl
programmers, then Java wil appear to be more popular, and vice versa. I
know that colleges and universities teach Java in their CS and IS
courses, and they don't teach Perl.

CC