We are tracking a lot of indicators that help us determine relative
popularity of scripting languages (thus my question on job postings) but
one that I thought worth sharing is something we have been doing for over a
year now complements to MJD.
Amazon put up their Amazon purchase circles late last August. Amazon's
purchase circles are specialized best-seller lists organized by
corporation, government, etc. As soon as that data went up, we noticed that
a lot of O'Reilly books were showing up on these lists (along with Harry
Potter and a few other X rated books I dare not mention at companies like
National Semiconductor). So, MJD sucked down their database for us and we
took a look to see how many purchases circles contained books on "X" vs.
books on "Y". One of those comparisons was Java vs. Perl and the results
are quite interesting. We have seen an explosion of interest in Java this
year(and Java books) and the question is, is this interest at the expense
of Perl. And not so much that people are switching but that people aren't
learning Perl in the first place. However, I do know of one document
conversion company that works a lot with XML that has switched to Java
because of some perceived problem (right or wrong, I can't comment) or lack
of features in Perl. Anyway....food for thought.
# of Amazon Purchase Circles containing books on "X"
1999 2000
"X" = Java 183 359
"X" = Perl 268 82
Now MJD sucked down the database before all the controversy about privacy
occurred and companies like Intel, IBM, HP, and basically all the Fortune
500 IT companies were present on the list. This year all those companies
are notably absent (Oracle, Informix, Sybase are still on the list).
However, I counted the number of unique purchase circles to see if there
were less this year than last and the results are below:
# of Unique Purchase Circles
1999 4,838
2000 5,132
Now we can make the assumption that Perl is represented more in the Fortune
500 IT companies and without those companies this skews the results but I
doubt it.
We are tracking several indicators and some of these indicators seem to
suggest that the popularity of Perl is not growing as fast as it has been
in the past. My theory is that Java is becoming much more ubiquitous, and
this is occurring at the expense of Perl (and also perhaps all of the other
OS languages but I can't say that for a sure.....yet).
The problem is I know a lot of good Java programmers, and I know a lot of
good Perl programmers but I don't know a lot of both so finding someone
that can speak intelligently about both languages is an exercise in finding
a needle in a haystack.
Anyway thought the above was interesting....more later.
Madeline Schnapp
Director of Market Research
O'Reilly and Associates
101 Morris Street, Sebastopol, CA 95472
Tel: 707-829-0515, FAX: 707-829-0104
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED], URL: http://www.oreilly.com
