{"id":316,"date":"2012-07-11T16:43:40","date_gmt":"2012-07-11T21:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/?p=316"},"modified":"2013-01-18T16:14:00","modified_gmt":"2013-01-18T22:14:00","slug":"overview-of-tech-trends-from-oreilly-book-sales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/2012\/07\/11\/overview-of-tech-trends-from-oreilly-book-sales\/","title":{"rendered":"Overview of tech trends from computer book sales"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>O&#8217;Reilly publishes a series of posts every year on the state of the computer book market. I want to spend a bit of time analyzing one of the posts from this year on <a href=\"http:\/\/radar.oreilly.com\/2012\/04\/computer-book-market-2011-part4.html\">languages<\/a>.\u00a0Although it&#8217;s no longer freshly minted news, I haven&#8217;t seen anyone else talking much about it \u2014 with the <a href=\"http:\/\/devopsangle.com\/2012\/04\/27\/programming-language-popularity-based-on-oreilly-book-sales\/\">notable exception<\/a> of Klint Finley, who saw me mention it on Twitter \u2014 and it remains timely today. It should be no surprise that book sales serve as a good predictor, because they indicate which technologies developers are learning (despite some unavoidable bias because of differences in who still buys books).<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the most interesting data comes from the graph showing each language&#8217;s trends individually over the past 8 years:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/dberkholz-media.redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/files\/2013\/01\/Lang_allYears-580.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"1542\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/2012\/07\/11\/overview-of-tech-trends-from-oreilly-book-sales\/lang_allyears-580\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/files\/2012\/07\/Lang_allYears-580.png\" data-orig-size=\"580,278\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Lang_allYears-580\" data-image-description=\"\" data-medium-file=\"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/files\/2012\/07\/Lang_allYears-580-300x143.png\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/files\/2012\/07\/Lang_allYears-580.png\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1542\" title=\"Lang_allYears-580\" src=\"http:\/\/dberkholz-media.redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/files\/2013\/01\/Lang_allYears-580.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"580\" height=\"278\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>What trends can we identify here?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Java is showing a resurgence, with a low in 2009. It remains the overall most popular language.<\/li>\n<li>JavaScript shows a similar pattern, with peaks in 2007 (after Ajax&#8217;s coinage in 2005 skyrocketed JavaScript to popularity) and a renewal in 2010\u20132011, potentially driven by Chrome as well as server-side options like Node.js.<\/li>\n<li>Microsoft languages like C#, the .NET family, and Visual Basic are on the decline, while still remaining popular in absolute terms. As a company, MS should continue to invest in creating a great development experience and platform for non-MS languages.<\/li>\n<li>The only Microsoft language showing a consistent growth trend is PowerShell, indicating the need that existed for a solid scripting environment on Windows.<\/li>\n<li>PHP, Ruby, and Perl may have seen their peaks, as all have declined greatly in popularity since 2007\u20132009. Ruby surprised me, although the others didn&#8217;t.<\/li>\n<li>On the other hand, Python continues to consistently grow in popularity every year, and R has shown an explosion in concert with Big Data and data science, both areas where Python is also a popular choice. These quickly growing niches have doubtless also contributed to the revival of Java, since Hadoop is written in that language.<\/li>\n<li>Low-level, compiled languages like C and C++ are on their way down. No surprise, with shrinking use cases due to the realization that programmer time is valuable and speed increases of higher-level languages.<\/li>\n<li>SQL is going downhill, likely driven by the dual trends of NoSQL and heavier use of ORMs, which are often built into popular app frameworks.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>Disclosure: Microsoft is a client, and O&#8217;Reilly is not.<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"acc_license\"><a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-sa\/3.0\/88x31.png\" alt=\"by-sa\" \/><\/a><\/div><!--<rdf:RDF xmlns=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/ns#\" xmlns:dc=\"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/elements\/1.1\/\" xmlns:rdf=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/1999\/02\/22-rdf-syntax-ns#\"><Work rdf:about=\"\"><license rdf:resource=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0\/\" \/><\/Work><License rdf:about=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0\/\"><requires rdf:resource=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/ns#Attribution\" \/><permits rdf:resource=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/ns#Reproduction\" \/><permits rdf:resource=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/ns#Distribution\" \/><permits rdf:resource=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/ns#DerivativeWorks\" \/><requires rdf:resource=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/ns#ShareAlike\" \/><requires rdf:resource=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/ns#Notice\" \/><\/License><\/rdf:RDF>-->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>O&#8217;Reilly publishes a series of posts every year on the state of the computer book market. I want to spend a bit of time analyzing one of the posts from this year on languages.\u00a0Although it&#8217;s no longer freshly minted news, I haven&#8217;t seen anyone else talking much about it \u2014 with the notable exception of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[5,7,12,13,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-big-data","category-data-science","category-nosql","category-open-source","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/files\/2012\/07\/Lang_allYears-580.png","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p23Tsn-56","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}